USC Shoah Foundation today launches a new Virtual IWalk web app that enables students and teachers to tour historic sites online while watching and listening to witness testimonies from the Visual History Archive.

For weeks, Eva (Geiringer) Schloss and a small band of young women had been exploring the far corners of the women’s section of Auschwitz-Birkenau, alone and, for the first time in months, unwatched.

It was January 1945, and Allied forces were nearing the camp. The SS had already evacuated most of the surviving inmates by way of middle-of-the-night marches in freezing temperatures. The gas chambers and crematoria had been destroyed. The SS guards had fled.

Dr. Josh Kun, who won a 2016 MacArthur "genius” grant for his unbounded thinking and artistry, doesn’t like to compartmentalize. A scholar of culture, social politics, history and communications, he is more interested in exploring the rough edges that result from unlikely connections than he is in the insularity or reflexive affirmation that might come from operating in a silo.

Rabbi Gunther Plaut was born in Germany and escaped to the United States in 1935, two years after the Nazi rise to power. He later immigrated to Canada, where he became rabbi at Holy Blossom Temple in Toronto. In March 1963, at Rabbi Plaut’s invitation, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at Holy Blossom Temple. During his speech, Dr. King said, “Time is neutral. Time can be used destructively or constructively. We must help time and the time is right now.”

In a five-hour interview with USC Shoah Foundation, Justus Rosenberg refers to himself as “small fry,” “a cog,” an unimportant person. And perhaps it was for this reason that for decades, the Bard College literature professor hadn’t let on—to his colleagues, to his students, and even, for a time, to his own wife—that he had fought and outwitted the Nazis during World War II to save thousands from persecution.