In January 2015, I had the incredible opportunity to travel to Poland with other students, as a junior intern, for USC Shoah Foundation’s and Discovery Education’s Auschwitz: Past is Present program, commemorating the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

In January 2015, I traveled to Poland for the Auschwitz: Past is Present professional development program, commemorating the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau. This entire experience, was and continues to be a life changing event for me on every level personally, professionally, and academically.

A person doesn’t visit the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Poland and come away unchanged, and I was no exception.

The empty barracks, the barbed-wire fencing, the solemn exhibits, the telltale chimneys – all these vestiges left a strong impression. But what struck me most was the sheer vastness of the sprawling memorial to history’s most notorious death camp.

Walking through Birkenau with my tour group, I gaped at the emptiness stretching for a mile in every direction – nothing but the crumbling remains of buildings half-buried in snow.

A graduate of USC Shoah Foundation’s teacher training programs in Hungary is constructing and pilot-testing the first-ever original Hungarian-language IWitness activity.

In January 2015, I had the incredible opportunity to travel to Poland with other students from across the country for USC Shoah Foundation’s and Discovery Education’s Auschwitz: Past is Present program. We toured various sites in Warsaw and Krakow, Poland, with teachers and our friend Paula Lebovics, a survivor of the Holocaust. Each point in the trip was remarkable and extremely inspiring. However, the visit to the Auschwitz-Birkeanu Memorial Museum impacted me the most.

USC Shoah Foundation International Training Consultant Martin Šmok presented the new Czech version of the popular educational resource Holocaust and Other Genocides in Prague on January 13.

To meet growing demands for access to the world’s largest archive of genocide testimony, USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education is announcing its Visual History Archive Program, which will reimagine how users connect to the testimonies.

On Jan. 19, 2016, the Organization of Istanbul Armenians (OIA) organized a commemoration for the ninth anniversary of the assassination of prominent Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink. It was exactly nine years after my friends and I learned of his murder without fully understanding who he was and what his legacy would mean to us in the years to come.

Middle and high school students have the chance to win scholarships of up to $5,000 – and additional money for their educators and schools – by entering the third annual IWitness Video Challenge.

The latest, most significant update to the Visual History Archive’s indexing software since 2008 addresses the growing need for a way to index testimonies with more than one survivor.