Recollections of Jews from Cologne
The online project LEFTOVERS offers insights into the memories of former Cologne Jews who escaped Nazi Germany or who survived deportation, and subsequently ghettos and concentration camps.
Memories of childhood and youth in Cologne in the late 1920s and 1930s, of youth groups, friends, teachers, Principal Dr. Klibansky and the Jewish grammar school Jawne, which almost all of the interviewees attended.
The stories told into the camera from childhood and youth days are at the same time testimonies of the concrete circumstances of exclusion and persecution of the Jewish population. These include the horrors associated with the Pogrom Night, the flight to a saving foreign country, deportation to ghettos and concentration camps, and in most cases the murder of parents, siblings, and friends.
Israel and New York City are the places that the narrating former Cologne citizens chose for a new beginning after a return to Germany was out of the question for them even after the collapse of the Nazi regime. Experiences of persecution, displacement, loss and the challenges of living in a new country are central to these personal and valuable testimonials.