A Hanukkah dinner in Odessa, bathers in the Baltic Sea, a tailor in front of his shop in Serbia - just some of the 25,000 images of pre-war Jewish life garnered from the private collections of survivors for a new exhibition.
With the number of those who lived through the Holocaust fast dwindling, researchers scoured cities across Europe, the Balkans, the former Soviet Union and Baltic states, to glean as much as they could about the lives of Jewish families in the years before World War II.
The resulting collection of stories and around 300 photographs - selected from the thousands that were copied and preserved - is now on display in the northern Austrian city of Linz, where Hitler also attended school.
"We wanted to show how Jewish people lived rather than how they died," says Edward Serotta, director of "The Library of Rescued Memories" exhibition.
Since 2000, experts from Serotta's Vienna-based organization Centropa have interviewed 1,350 elderly Jews living in 15 different European countries and copied around 25,000 old photographs.
"We spent the summer in our 'Lederhosen' (traditional costume of short leather trousers), we felt we were real Austrians," said Heinz Bischitz, one of the Jews interviewed.
The 77-year-old fled Austria in 1938, the year of the country's annexation by Nazi Germany, when he was six-years-old.
He and his parents went to Hungary, where with the help of a relation, they were able to escape persecution. A photograph, taken just a few months before their flight, shows Bischitz in the snow, standing next to an impressive car belonging to his father.
"My grandparents would have been able to follow to Hungary, too, but they didn't see the danger. They stayed and even bought new furniture," Bischitz told AFP.
Talking to the interviewer from Centropa enabled him to keep those memories alive, he said.
"The older I get, the more difficult it is to recall. But it's necessary for future generations."
"By using personal stories, we hope we can create a new way to get young people interested in history," Serotta said.
"Eye-witness accounts give us the full picture of the 20th century."
On around 100 panels in the foyer of Linz's 61-metre (190-ft) "Wissensturm" or Tower of Knowledge, visitors can see smiling faces on feast days, the frowns of school photos, or pictures of prison camps.
"All the children in the front row have survived and I'm still in touch with some of them," states the caption written by Albert Eskenazi next to a photograph of an internment camp at Hvar, Croatia, in 1943.
Finding the photographs, however, was not always easy.
"People were reluctant to let us have the photos, even for just an hour, to digitalise them," said Serotta.
"'These are the last memories I have of him or her', they say."
"Young people nowadays know so little about this period," said Tanja Eckstein, who conducted more than 70 interviews in Vienna for the project.
"And there are fewer and fewer eye-witnesses: most of the people I've talked to are (now) dead or no longer in a position to relate their memories."
From Linz, the exhibition will travel to other towns and cities in Austria until December 11.
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