TIMISOARA, Romania--"I had Romanian, German, Hungarian, Serbian, and Jewish friends in my childhood. We all got along well together. My grandparents lived in Coronini Place, where the Catholic church in the Fabric neighborhood is, right on the corner, on the first floor. As small kids we went to the church to ring the bells. We got 25 bani for this. The coins had a hole, but you could ride the tram for this money. And despite me being a Jew, nobody asked why I went to the church there." The memories of Andrei Spira, born in Fiume (nowadays Rijeka, in Croatia) in 1913, and some 40 other present and former residents of the Romanian part of the Banat have been collected and edited in Memoria salvata. Evreii din Banat, ieri si azi (Rescued Memory: The Jews of the Banat Yesterday and Today), the most recent volume of anthropological and oral history research conducted by the Timisoara-based A Treia Europa (Third Europe) foundation. "We usually start with the eldest members of a community," says Smaranda Vultur, who led nine interviewers in the four-year project that culminated in the book's publication in December. [The writer of this article conducted one of the interviews.] Among the members of the local Jewish community whose oral histories appear in the book, 10 have recently died, Vultur says. "The community is shrinking; today it numbers a little more than 400 members, all of them Neologian [liberal]. Before World War II there were around 12,000 Jews living here." Gheorghe Reisz, born in 1934 in Lugoj, some 60 kilometers east of Timisoara, recalled the cultural variety of the Banat in an oral history recorded by Adrian Onica before Reisz's death in 2002. "In 1962 I married Eva Mizrahi. She is Jewish. In my wife's family, things are more complex. Her mother and father are Jewish, but one of the grandmothers is German and another Slovak. As you see, there is a mix of cultural orientations in our family. My mother's father, Pollack, came from the southern part of Romania, my father from Hungary. These are usual things here in Mitteleuropa. We always celebrate the Jewish holidays but also have a Christmas tree and paint eggs for the Christian Easter, and things work well." The Jewish oral histories form a component of Third Europe's "Banat Memory Archive," a project begun in 1997, as Vultur explains, to be "a reservoir of the memories of different generations of people, mostly older than 60, who were or are living in the Banat." Historically, this region straddling the corner where present-day Romania, Hungary, and Serbia meet has been a border community of many languages and cultures. Typically, Jewish families with roots in the Banat tended to speak Hungarian, although Romanian, German, and Yiddish were also spoken. Not all those whose memories are collected in the volume were natives of the Banat; immigrants were included in order to show the diversity of the people who make up the community of Banat Jews today. There are also two people born locally who now live elsewhere. One of these is Magdalena Csendes Holender, mother of Ioan Holender, the director of the Vienna State Opera. "Through her life story we tried to present the way of life of an important category, that of the Jews from the grand bourgeoisie, very cosmopolitan, very open, who also played a very important role in the industrialization of this region, the development of urban life. Most of them are living abroad. But we tried our best to have a large variety of people," Vultur says. SUBJECTIVE TRUTHS Many of those interviewed, she says, "found the option of identifying oneself as a Jew or a Hungarian sometimes difficult. The Jews from the Banat also share with other groups here the intercultural experiences typical for this region." Under the Romanian wartime regime of Ion Antonescu, some Banat Jews were deported to camps in Transdnistria, although the Jewish community escaped mass transports to the death camps. Timisoara's chief rabbi, Ernest Neumann, was born in 1919 in Ceica, north of the Banat. In his oral history he comments, "Here in the Banat the danger wasn't that of a deportation to the extermination camp of Auschwitz, but of a deportation eastwards, to Transdnistria: Some of the Jews, a few, because they were involved in the trials of Communists, others because they demanded a transit visa for the Soviet Union in order to go to the States. All of

them were transported to Transdnistria and one of the groups was shot." "In September 1942 I was deported to Transdnistria, to the Vapniarka camp washing," remembers Nicolae Campeanu, born in 1914 in Arad. “It was minus 10 degrees Celsius. We had no tap water; we used melted snow for washing. "After two or three months it was a disaster. Our food consisted of fodder peas. Over 300 of the 1,200 detainees were paralyzed because of it." In Rescued Memory, memories are valued not so much for their accuracy as their subjectivity. The book, Rabbi Neumann says, is "an obstruction in the path of forgetfulness."