After the Holocaust, Jewish survivors from Eastern European towns that had been destroyed collaborated on around 1,000 memorial books in Yiddish and Hebrew, called yizker bikher. Most were written by dozens of former residents, often 20 to 50 contributors, in a warm, everyday style. About two-thirds of a typical volume describes prewar life, with photos of school groups, markets and sports teams, and maps drawn from memory showing forests, rivers and street nicknames. The rest covers the Nazi occupation and lists the dead. The earliest studied volume, from Volkovisk in Belarus, appeared in 1946, only a year after the liberation of Auschwitz. The format drew on the older pinkes, the community registers that every Eastern European Jewish town kept.

Hampi is a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Karnataka, India, with more than 1,600 surviving remains spread over 4,100 hectares. It was the capital of the Vijayanagara Empire from 1336 to 1565. Travellers from Persia and Portugal described it as a prosperous, wealthy and grand city with temples, markets and farms along the Tungabhadra River. By 1500 it was estimated to be the world's second-largest city after Beijing, and probably India's richest at the time. In 1565 a coalition of Muslim sultanates defeated the Vijayanagara Empire, its capital was conquered and destroyed, and the city was left in ruins. Hampi remains a religious centre, with the active Virupaksha Temple at its heart.