As a teacher at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, who survived the tragedy on Feb. 14, 2018, I have spent the past year grappling with this question.

On January 25, 2019, the fifth- and sixth-graders of a school in Cottbus, Germany honored all those affected during the Holocaust by unveiling a Butterfly Project memorial to the 1.5 million children murdered during this dark moment in history. This first-ever initiative in Germany introduced a new, younger audience to real stories of local children.

We commemorate the students and teachers who were killed on Feb. 14, 2018 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, and we gratefully acknowledge the class of Ivy Schamis, the recipient of USC Shoah Foundation’s inaugural Stronger Than Hate Educator Award.

Alberto Innocenti, grandfather of Francesca Innocenti, secretly hid Jewish people -- including members of his wife’s family -- in his apartment during World War II. For this and other acts of heroism the Catholic Italian was recognized posthumously by Yad Vashem.

My life and my work at USC Shoah Foundation are strongly connected to the joys and the sorrows of the Armenian community. Thus, I was both shocked and heartened by recent separate events that demonstrated how far we’ve come in advancing human dignity and how far we still have to go.

USC Shoah Foundation is saddened by the recent loss of Walter P. Loebenberg, a friend of the Institute and a Holocaust survivor who, after finding refuge in the United States, went on to open the Florida Holocaust Museum, one of the largest Holocaust museums in the nation. He was 94.

Born June 21, 1923, in Olcsva, Hungary, Weiss and her family were sent to the Mátészalka ghetto. She was then deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp before being liberated by Soviet armed forces.

In her research of testimonies, USC student Virginia Bullington observed that women in the context of both the Armenian and Tutsi Rwanda genocides are often described as “bearers of culture, maternity and nationalism,” while in the Guatemalan context, “indigenous women were not essentialized -- they were erased.”

The controversial standoff between a tribal elder and a high school student that went viral has captivated the media and those on all sides of the political aisle. While all the details are still being uncovered, what strikes me is the climate that permeates our nation. We have devolved to a state of “othering” our countrymen, without reflecting on how our own actions may affect one another. We have stopped seeking to understand one another and instead just attack, sometimes even when the facts are not clear. 

USC Shoah Foundation joined a Friday ceremony at a classroom in Cottbus, Germany that contributed 100 butterflies to the Butterfly Project, an international effort by schoolchildren to paint 1.5 million ceramic butterflies – one for every child murdered in the Holocaust.