All over the world, Jewish survivors of the Holocaust era are giving testimony – but not for USC Shoah Foundation’s original collection of over 51,000 Holocaust survivor testimonies. Instead, they are the first participants of the new Testimonies of North Africa and the Middle East project.

Visitors to the Auschwitz Jewish Center in Oświęcim, Poland, will view USC Shoah Foundation testimony in the center’s permanent exhibit beginning in May.

The designers at Olson, an advertising and digital agency in Minneapolis, typically spend their days creating ad campaigns for clients including McDonalds, Target and General Mills. But for the last six months, a team from Olson has undertaken a project of an entirely different sort.

Looking into a mirror and making sure her hair looked just so, Yevnigue Salibian didn’t notice me as I was taking her picture. It took a few seconds, but when she finally realized I had documented her act of vanity, she smiled coyly.

All over Ukraine, testimony from the Visual History Archive is inspiring children to create remarkable artwork representing true scenes of discrimination during the Holocaust. With their artwork, each of these young Ukrainians is hoping to earn a place at an annual summer camp dedicated to building tolerance and awareness of their country’s diverse cultures.

High school students from Sopron, Hungary, have created a traveling exhibition to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the deportations of Jews from Hungary during World War II, drawing from USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive for their research.

The 53,000 testimonies in the Visual History Archive from the USC Shoah Foundation tell a complete personal history of life before, during and after the interviewee’s firsthand experience with genocide. These testimonies are an invaluable resource for humanity, as in addition to their experience through some of the darkest chapters of human history; the testimonies also recount happy memories of childhood and successes in life including careers, children and grandchildren. 

Students may still be enjoying their summer vacation, but the new school year is just around the corner. USC Shoah Foundation has prepared a convenient one-stop-shop of all its educational resources to help educators plan to teach with testimony this year.

USC Shoah Foundation’s Nanjing Massacre testimony collection more than doubled in size last week when USC Shoah Foundation and Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall conducted 18 new interviews with Nanjing Massacre survivors.

With nearly 52,000 interviews from survivors of the Holocaust and other genocides, the archive of audio-visual testimony assembled and maintained by USC Shoah Foundation is so abundant it would take at least 12 years to watch it from beginning to end. And that’s assuming the footage would be rolling 24 hours a day, seven days a week. When I started my new job here at the Institute, I was struck by this statistic, which adequately conveys the scope of this incredible resource.

I adored my father and admired him greatly. Harold Eisenberg was a good man in every sense of the word. He spoke about his life in Opatow, Poland before World War II and even his experience during the Holocaust, but he also lived very much in the present, working hard to provide for his family.  The business he started after the war became the foundation for much of our extended family’s success. I was named for his mother and his sister, who both perished in the Holocaust, and my father would often look at me tenderly and tell me how much I reminded him of his mother. 

Stunning works of art, film and writing have once again been given top prizes at Chapman University and The 1939 Society’s 16th Annual Holocaust Art & Writing Contest.

As part of USC Shoah Foundation’s Preserving the Legacy initiative, 281 testimonies from Holocaust Museum Houston are currently being indexed for integration into the Visual History Archive.

Kori Street gave a presentation titled “Listen and Listen Again: Thinking About Testimony and Tolerance” for over 50 staff who work with people who have been granted asylum.

As Ukraine embarks on an effort to radically change its law enforcement culture, USC Shoah Foundation’s international consultant in Ukraine, Anna Lenchovska, is using testimony to teach newly trained police officers tolerance and non-discrimination.

USC Shoah Foundation Executive Director Stephen Smith joined 25 educators and researchers from Israel and Europe for an expert seminar today on Holocaust education in the 21st century.

Renowned Holocaust scholar and former USC Shoah Foundation Yom HaShoah Scholar Professor Yehuda Bauer has given his testimony to USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive.

Testimony from the Visual History Archive is being used as evidence to posthumously bestow Sister Louise the highest honor in the world for Holocaust rescuers, the title of Righteous Among the Nations from Yad Vashem.

When watching a testimony in the Visual History Archive, Liliane Weissberg pays close attention to the words the survivor is saying, and, just as importantly, to the silences in between those words.

Forty-eight testimony clips have been added to the popular “Watch” page on IWitness.

Survivors and witnesses of the 2015 synagogue attack in Copenhagen were interviewed for a new collection on contemporary anti-Semitism.

Every once in a while, I have a moment when seemingly disconnected ideas collide in peculiar relief, bringing clarity and making sense – admittedly sometimes only to me. I had one of those days recently when I was looking at the calendar and realized that International Women’s Day on March 8 was approaching.

While the average USC student was dragging themselves out of bed to make it to their first class after Spring Break, I was--rather jet-lagged--sitting in an 800 year old room cloaked in paintings of old intellectuals and world renowned writers in a tiny corridor of Hertford College at Oxford University, wondering how on Earth I could be so lucky to miss a week of school to hang out at one of the oldest, most prestigious centers of learning in the history of Western Civilization.

Matsuoka interviewed hundreds of Nanjing Massacre survivors and perpetrators and is nicknamed "the conscience of Japan."

You never know what you will find in the Visual History Archive. You hear stories of survival, death, life, hope and even friendship amidst the chaos of genocide. Sidney Shafner and Marcel Levy have remained friends for over 70 years – since the liberation of the concentration camp Dachau.

Much like testimony shows how regimes have constructed borders; testimony demonstrates how individuals can construct bridges to connect with people of different beliefs and identities.

Several months ago in my former senior high school class, students were introduced to the ideas of illiberalism.  When discussing this issue, students are faced with how governments will apply laws and acts during times of crisis, as well as everyday life, that would limit or suspend civil liberties of any individual or group. 

As fall meets winter, we find ourselves in the seasonal in-between – summer is gone and winter is not yet biting. Yet it is in the in-between that we find moments for appreciation with friends and family. We create these moments in the cycle of the seasons. I think about what it means to live in the in-between – in a place of ambiguity and uncertainty where we must negotiate both the successes and the struggles of daily life. Progress propels us forward, but sometimes it is a roller coaster rather than the smooth gradient we may wish for.

On October 29, 2012 Hurricane Sandy struck my home: New York City, on a cloudy Thursday evening. Sandy had a massive impact on the city that never sleeps. The entire circulatory system, the subways, of the city were shut down, which made connecting with family and friends impossible.

Researchers conducting the study for the Hungarian Academy of Sciences say their conclusions are all the more vital in an age where, thanks to the internet, youth are more susceptible to believing “fake information.”