Hannah Lessing represents Austrian society’s desire to atone. Her unique job involves, among other things, tracking down Austrian Holocaust survivors or their kin – inside the country and out – to offer financial reparations.

Lessing, the secretary general of the National Fund of the Republic of Austria for Victims of National Socialism, came to USC Shoah Foundation this week to discuss a potential collaborative project with the Institute.

Roughly 1,000 audio-only interviews recorded by students of UCLA history Professor Richard Hovannisian were entrusted to USC Shoah Foundation. This week, Hovannisian and three of his former students gave a talk about how they amassed such a large repository of memory at so crucial a time, “when denialism was huge.”

In his 104 years, B. Artin Haig witnessed both the best and the worst humanity had to offer. He saw Babe Ruth play at Yankee Stadium. He photographed President Franklin Roosevelt. And he was one of the few remaining survivors of the Armenian Genocide in North America.

The news about a group of teenagers throwing a Nazi salute at a party in Orange County is a startling reminder that knowledge of the Holocaust is fading. Here are four free online classroom-ready activities on IWitness that address the topics of antisemitism, bystanders and hatred.

The piece highlights how the interactive biographies will enable future generations to ask questions of and receive immediate answers from pre-recorded images of Holocaust survivors, long after the last of the living witnesses are gone.

Last week a group of us from USC Shoah Foundation were in Guatemala with our testimony partner, the Foundation for Forensic Anthropology in Guatemala (FAFG). We attended the funeral of a Mayan man whose remains were recently exhumed by FAFG – 36 years after he disappeared during the genocide there.