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Judit Kinszki's family was not, on the surface, all that extraordinary. Her father Imre spoke several languages, dabbled in photography, admired Winston Churchill and worked at a textile office most of his life. Her mother typed manuscripts for local poets and philosophers and could whip up five different kinds of cakes "out of practically nothing." Judit herself, now 68 and living in Budapest, grew up and became a mother and schoolteacher. Yet the Kinszkis' story stands out not so much because of what they did, but where they lived — and when. They were Jews in Hungary before the outbreak of World War II. When the Holocaust engulfed Central and Eastern Europe, it erased not only millions of lives but an entire way of life.

Now several new projects are under way to recover what was lost. An ambitous research effort titled "Witness to a Jewish Century," launched last week in Vienna, will exhibit on the Internet as many as 1,000 interviews with elderly survivors (Judit Kinszki among them), along with 100,000 never-before-published family photographs. Also this month, and also on the Internet, an actor and part-time researcher in the Czech Republic will begin posting the results of his unusual labors — recording the inscriptions on ancient Jewish tombstones (see accompanying story). And in Poland, plans are afoot to build a new museum that will recreate homes, streets and whole villages representing 800 years of Jewish life. The museum will be constructed on the site of the infamous Warsaw ghetto. Discussions are under way with American architect Frank Gehry, the son of Polish Jews. "We want Poland to be seen as more than the world's largest Jewish graveyard," says project director Jerzy Halbersztadt.

These efforts have one thing in common: their focus is not on how Jews died at the hands of Hitler and his sympathizers, a story that has been searingly told elsewhere, but instead on how they lived. "This is not a Holocaust project," says Ed Serotta, director of the Central Europe Center for Research and Documentation in Vienna. "We're providing the elderly Jews of Central and Eastern Europe with a platform to tell us about, and show us, the world that was destroyed."

The platform itself is noteworthy. The Centropa oral history project appears on the Internet, which can accommodate more material, in a more accessible way, than specialist museums. It also extends the reach of that material around the world. "It's a real contribution," says Boston University historian Ezra Mendelsohn, a leading specialist on East European Jewry.

The story of Judit Kinszki, now available with 60 other interviews and 750 family photographs at www.centropa.org, begins with her great-grandfather — a journalist and lawyer who was among the first to represent minorities in the old Austro-Hungarian Empire — and ends in the present day. But the focus is on the years just before World War II. With a storyteller's eye, Judit describes an unlikely mixture of worldly and parochial, secular and devout, in 1930s Budapest. Her father Imre was at the top of his class in a private school but unable to attend university because of restrictions on Jewish admission. As a result, he immersed himself in photography, developing his own darkroom techniques and leaving behind a striking black-and-white archive. A pacifist and intellectual, Imre refused to allow even popguns in his home, opposed the circumcision of his son and delighted in making whole villages out of folded paper for his children. "He was such a gentle, modest man," says Judit. "It was impossible not to love my father."

The sound of Yiddish and the aromas of the seder suffuse other stories told to Centropa researchers. The craggy face of an old rabbi named Abraham Rezmovitz glares out from under a wide-brimmed hat in an account of the family Rezmovitz, who lived in a part of what was then Hungary and is now Romania. "Jewish fanatacism shone in his face," says his grandson Andor. Abraham was known for thumping children with a stick if they failed in their recitations. But he was also fearless: once leaping into a whirlpool on the River Tisza in his flowing black caftan to rescue a drowning child. On another occasion, when a local bailiff came to extract a bribe and ended up trying to run off with a tefillin, a sacred phylactery, Abraham attacked him mercilessly. The old man backed off only when his wife hustled the bailiff into the kitchen and plied him with liquor. "You will see, you Jew, you will soon be in difficulties!" warned the man.

While the Holocaust is not the focus of Centropa or the other documentation projects now under way, it is the coda that elevates their significance. Judit's father Imre died in 1945 on a forced march to Germany. Her older brother Gabor, a brilliant scholar who, like Judit, was baptized a Greek Catholic, was killed when he confessed to a concentration camp guard at Buchenwald that he was "only" a student and had no profession. He was doused with water and allowed to freeze to death.

Those deaths were a terrible loss. Even after the war, says Judit Kinszki, she would go to the train station every day to wait for her father to return. Yet the act of recalling her family history has helped. "Every time I talk about my father," she says "I feel I learn something new." Nearly 6 million Jews from Central and Eastern Europe perished in the Holocaust. Many more moved away after the war. Outside the old Soviet Union only a few hundred thousand remain. Survivors like Judit Kinszki, who remember the way things were, are a dwindling few. They have a story to tell, and now there are places to tell it.

• ANDREW PURVIS/Vienna
• The Secret History of European Jews