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.

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.

Early this year, when the Swedish History Museum opened its exhibit about the Holocaust – an exhibit that includes USC Shoah Foundation testimonies and some of its interactive biographies – it marked the state-funded museum’s first foray into the topic.

The exhibit has been a major success, say two Swedish museum professionals who played a prominent role in the installation, and who came to USC Shoah Foundation’s headquarters in Los Angeles last week to discuss taking the partnership to the next level.

Survivors and their testimonies have been central to Holocaust research and memorial culture. Even before the end of the Shoah, survivor historians in parts of Eastern Europe liberated from Nazi occupation collected testimonies and conducted interviews with fellow survivors.

 

Each year, the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research hosts an interdisciplinary team of scholars from different universities and different countries for one week so that they can develop and discuss a collaborative innovative research project in the field of Holocaust and Genocide

In an effort to spark a social movement against hatred in all forms, USC Shoah Foundation, established by Steven Spielberg after his experience filming “Schindler’s List”— which gave voice to survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust and other genocides through  education and action – and Discovery Education, today announced the Teaching with Testimony 2019 Stronger Than Hate Challenge winners.

 

Move-in day for students at the University of Southern California this week led to a remarkable small-world moment between two strangers with ties to the Holocaust in the public-exhibit space of USC Shoah Foundation’s lobby.

Fifty-eight-year-old Alexander Moissis of the San Francisco Bay Area and his wife were helping their freshman son move into a dormitory when Alexander decided to steal away for a few minutes to visit USC Shoah Foundation, which is located on campus next to the dorm.

Their loved ones – including women and children – were slaughtered by the military and tossed into mass graves.

For more than 30 years, survivors of the Guatemalan Genocide against the indigenous population assumed nobody cared about their stories.

After all, nobody had ever bothered to ask.