It was really just a coincidence that in her efforts to reduce racism, hatred, and violence, some of Ceci Chan’s earliest work with USC Shoah Foundation involved the Nanjing Massacre.

Chan, a strategic investor and philanthropist, had been funding projects around Holocaust education for 13 years when she met USC Shoah Foundation Finci-Viterbi Executive Director Stephen Smith at a Shabbat dinner while both were attending the USC Global Conference in Hong Kong in the fall of 2011.

The documentary Two Sides of Survival just landed Winner of Best Documentary Short at the Angeles Film Festival.

Produced by USC Shoah Foundation, Two Sides of Survival brings together stories from the East and West, chronicling how Jews who fled the Nazis in Europe, and Chinese who were threatened by Japanese occupation, improbably found refuge close to one another in the 1930’s and during World War II.

In China, the number of people still alive who survived the 1937 Nanjing Massacre at the hands of Japanese invaders has fallen to minuscule levels – some experts put the number around 80.

USC Shoah Foundation’s collection of about 100 testimonies of survivors from this rampage that killed some 300,000 civilians and unarmed soldiers includes the vast majority of them.

This fall, the Institute reached a milestone: The entire collection of Nanjing testimonies has been indexed and subtitled in English.

On the 80th anniversary of the Nanjing Massacre today, the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall in Nanjing, China, debuted its permanent exhibition of New Dimensions in Testimony (NDT), USC Shoah Foundation’s interactive survivor testimony technology.

The museum staff and students were among the first to see the NDT testimony of Nanjing Massacre survivor Madame Xia Shuqin.

The Holocaust is inarguably the most heinous crime against a group of people we have seen in modern times. Despite decades of wrestling with how such an atrocity could have occurred and the postwar generation promising never again, history keeps repeating itself. Therefore, the collection and the custody of testimonies from those who bear witness remains a necessary task for as long as inhumanities keep occurring. Genocide and crimes against humanity transcend religions, cultures, languages, geographic regions, socioeconomics, gender, age, etc., making testimony collection across all cultures not only a moral responsibility, but imperative given the mission of USC Shoah Foundation. We know for sure that under a certain set of circumstances, genocide could happen anywhere, and again.

Madame Xia Shuqin, child survivor of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, traveled from Nanjing, China, to Los Angeles this week to film an interview for USC Shoah Foundation’s New Dimensions in Testimony (NDT) project.

The 22 new testimonies will bring the total number in the Nanjing Massacre collection to 72.

USC Shoah Foundation staff are currently in Nanjing, China, to record about 20 more testimonies of Nanjing Massacre survivors.