Mission Underway in Hungary and Poland

Board members, senior staff and other supporters of USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education are traveling throughout Hungary and Poland this week on the Institute’s mission to Eastern Europe.

The trip is an opportunity for supporters to experience firsthand the Institute’s work in Eastern Europe and engage deeply with the testimonies of local Holocaust survivors in the Visual History Archive in honor of the Institute’s upcoming 20th anniversary in 2014.

The testimonies will guide the delegation through Jewish life prior to the war, the events of the Holocaust, liberation and rescue, and life after the war.

The delegation is touring historical and Jewish cultural sites in Budapest, Krakow and Warsaw, including Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps, former ghettos and museums. The other activities focus on USC Shoah Foundation’s educational work in the region: meeting with educators who are using testimony in their classrooms, seeing testimony-based lessons in action and visiting Visual History Archive access sites.

The Institute’s executive director, Stephen Smith, is blogging about the mission on The Times of Israel. Read his first blog post here, about Hungary’s “invisible” Holocaust history and how memories of the past are evoked – and forgotten – throughout the city of Budapest.

USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive allows users to search through and view nearly 52,000 audiovisual testimonies of survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust and other genocides. These testimonies were conducted in 57 countries and in 33 languages.