A shared history told through personal stories
Connecting Stories is a free bilingual digital learning module created by Terraforming and the Arolsen Archives to help young people in Serbia and Germany investigate migration as a connected European history.
It begins with a transnational chapter of European history: the experiences of Jews fleeing Nazi persecution in Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia who sought routes through the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, including present-day Serbia, during the 1930s and the Second World War.
Through personal stories, students encounter them not only as refugees and targets of persecution, but as historical actors with identities, relationships, values and agency. Their stories illuminate resilience and resistance, courage and generosity, mutual assistance and efforts to preserve dignity under restricted circumstances.
Students also examine the reasons for flight, the dangers and restrictions people faced, and the changing responses of state authorities, local communities and Jewish aid networks. The module preserves the historical specificity of Nazi persecution and the Holocaust while presenting Jewish history as an integral part of Europe’s shared history and heritage.
This human-centered approach extends across all four chapters, presenting migrants and refugees as individuals who act, decide, help others and respond to changing circumstances.
Four chapters, interconnected histories
From this starting point, four video-quiz chapters trace migration between the two societies across time:
1. Jewish flight from Nazi persecution through Yugoslavia;
2. Serbian labor migration to Germany from the 1960s;
3. Displacement caused by the wars of the 1990s and the arrival of refugees from the former Yugoslavia in Germany; and
4. The Balkan route and public responses to refugees and migrants since 2015.
Serbia and Germany appear at different times as places of departure, transit, reception and decision-making. The purpose is not to equate historically distinct events, but to enable learners to recognize interconnected histories, changing roles and recurring questions about borders, belonging, exclusion, assistance and individual responsibility.
Shared material and shared questions
The project’s decisive cross-border choice was to give learners in both countries the same core material. German and Serbian students do not receive separate national stories with predetermined conclusions.
Instead, they encounter shared evidence and questions, compare perspectives, test their knowledge, and form their own reasoned positions. Kalina, a student from Serbia, and Uli, from Germany, guide the experience as young hosts in an explanatory video accompanied by an interactive quiz. Learners must respond as the story advances, turning viewing into active inquiry and discussion.
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