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Rob Kuznia

Rob Kuznia joined the communications department at USC Shoah Foundation in August 2014. He worked as a full-time journalist for 15 years, including as an education reporter for the Daily Breeze newspaper in Los Angeles, where he won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting for his series of stories uncovering corruption at a Southern California school district. Kuznia’s work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Daily Beast and the New York Times. He is an adjunct professor at USC for a class at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, where he has spearheaded a project in which students are recording video testimonies of mass-shooting survivors.

Articles by Rob Kuznia

  • Holocaust survivor’s family reads family letters from WWII on stage in Germany

    December 17, 2019

    About a month before the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, sparking World War II, a desperate Jewish father in Germany penned a letter in broken English to a friend in England, Mrs. Wolf.

     “I beg to inform you that we have got a refuse from the Aid Committee in London, owing to our high waiting number for America. … We are very discouraged by this answer and are now forced to get out our children as quick as possible.”

    Alfons Lasker, an attorney in Breslau, was on a mission to get his two daughters – Anita and Renate – out of Germany. He did not succeed.

  • Testimonies from 1937 Nanjing Massacre in China fully indexed and subtitled

    November 18, 2019

    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.

  • In memory of Branko Lustig, producer of ‘Schindler’s List’ and a founder of USC Shoah Foundation

    November 14, 2019

    Today we mourn the loss of one of our closest friends, Branko Lustig, a Holocaust survivor and two-time Academy Award winner who produced Schindler’s List and played an indispensable role in the founding of USC Shoah Foundation. He was 87.

    Shortly after the film’s 1993 release, Lustig -- who witnessed horrific atrocities at Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and other concentration and labor camps -- led the drive to implement Steven Spielberg’s vision of collecting 50,000 Holocaust testimonies for what was then called Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation.

  • Panel: Women in media who have worked in dangerous conflict zones share stories

    November 7, 2019

    An ISIS commander. Victims of the Cambodian and Bosnian genocides. Inmates at Guantanamo Bay.

    They are among the many subjects portrayed in the work of three women who spoke this week about their experiences as journalists and filmmakers working in conflict zones and with traumatized individuals on a USC Visions & Voices panel jointly organized by USC Shoah Foundation and the USC Fisher Museum of Art. 

  • “Why We Hate” docuseries on Discovery kicks off with a panel that included a former Nazi and a genocide survivor

    October 19, 2019

    When Ursula Martens was a little girl living in Germany, she was happy to be forced by law at age 10 to join the Hitler Youth. 

    “Everything was free,” she said. “You could go to theaters. … They would send you on vacations with other children at nice resorts.” 

    It wasn’t until she was a little older that she realized something was wrong.

  • Dimensions in Testimony theater established at new Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum

    October 6, 2019

    The Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum this month became the second in the world to install a permanent theater to display Dimensions in Testimony – an interactive, holographic project developed by USC Shoah Foundation that will allow visitors to interact with a Holocaust survivor long after they are no longer with us.

  • “We Share The Same Sky” Is The First Testimony-Based Podcast Presented By USC Shoah Foundation

    September 30, 2019
    The Institute for Visual History and Education introduces its first-ever testimony-based podcast, We Share the Same Sky. In a seven-episode arc, We Share the Same Sky presents an intimate portrait of Rachael Cerrotti’s family history and her own personal journey of love and loss as she retraces the steps of her grandmother, Hana Seckel-Drucker, who was displaced across Europe during and in the wake of World War II.

  • In memory of Holocaust survivor Jack Welner, who became soulmates with his USC Shoah Foundation interviewer

    September 27, 2019

    We are saddened to hear of the recent passing of Jack Welner, who survived a Jewish ghetto in Poland, a labor camp near the Dachau concentration camp in Germany, and the Auschwitz Nazi death camp in Poland – where his mother was murdered on arrival – before immigrating to Denver, Colorado, where he began a new life. He was 98.

    When Welner gave his testimony to USC Shoah Foundation in 1995, it changed his life.

  • Antisemitism and Sports

    September 25, 2019
    Jewish track-and-field athlete Margaret Lambert remembers the pressure she felt when competing in the Adolf Hitler Stadium during the 1936 Olympic tryouts for a non-Jewish audience that objected to her presence. Maria Breitinger had her decathelon medal denied by her antisemitic school principal. Jules Forgacs remembers his first soccer match after liberation.

  • Personal stories of surviving the Holocaust unveiled at powerful art exhibition

    September 17, 2019
    Painter David Kassan has sat with survivors of the Holocaust for countless hours during the past five years, carefully listening to their stories of pain, grief, resilience and quiet victory.
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