After completing an intense two-week introductory session at the University of Southern California, seven students and two professors are ready to begin this summer’s Problems Without Passports trip to Rwanda.

High school students from Sopron, Hungary, have created a traveling exhibition to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the deportations of Jews from Hungary during World War II, drawing from USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive for their research.

June 20 is World Refugee Day, dedicated to raising awareness about refugees throughout the world, a day on which I inevitably always look back on the formative years of my life. In 1991, my family and I were forced out of our home in Croatia because of our ethnic origin, and we began a life of exile, torn from everything known and dear to us and forced to swim in the uncharted waters of life as a refugee. Our lives had been changed drastically; a life of abundance had become a life of misery. 

In January 2014, four scholars from the “Holocaust Geographies Collaborative”—an international, interdisciplinary group of researchers evaluated the link between personal testimony, the index of the archive and geography.

I was born and brought up in a university town in the Czech Republic called Olomouc. It had a small Jewish community.   My father is a writer and academic.  Five years ago he interviewed Milos Dobry who was a prominent member of the Olomouc Jewish community and a long-term Holocaust survivor.  His story was fascinating - about how he and his brother had survived Terezín and Auschwitz and how Milos had gone on to have a successful career as an inventor and sports personality.  I went to meet Milos Dobry personally to further interview him about his history.

USC Trustee Andrew Viterbi PhD ’62 and his wife, Erna, have given $5 million to USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education. It is the largest gift the Institute has received since it became part of USC in 2006.

The Problems Without Passports class hit the ground running in Kigali, Rwanda, spending their first four days in the country visiting genocide memorials and meeting with survivor support groups.

Echoes and Reflections, the multimedia Holocaust education program of which USC Shoah Foundation is a founding partner, introduced a brand-new website and updated teacher’s guide that includes new content and reflects the most current pedagogy for teaching about the Holocaust.

Educators attending the International Society for Technology in Education (ITSE) Conference and Expo this weekend will explore IWitness at an interactive “playground” – a showcase awarded to select educational resources.

In the Spring 2014 issue of PastForward, USC Professor of neuroscience Antonio Damasio discusses how personal stories can evoke deep empathy for human tragedy.

As an intern at the USC Shoah Foundation and a student on the Problems Without Passports trip to Rwanda this summer, I’m more than familiar with the phrases “Never Forget” and “Never Again.” Sometimes the two seem like tired mottos. They’re valid and true, but oftentimes I think I miss the full impact of those few words.

Hungarian ethics teachers and Polish educators were introduced this spring to IWalk, USC Shoah Foundation’s educational program that combines testimony with real-life locations, and are interested in incorporating it into their teaching.  

For the sixth time, the Freie Universität Berlin will offer a free summer course for international and visiting scholars about USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive. This summer, the topic of the course is memories of the Nazis’ forced laborers.

Despite the current political turmoil in their country, six teachers from Crimea traveled to Kyiv last month for a seminar on oral history and USC Shoah Foundation’s Where Do Human Rights Begin teacher’s guide, led by Ukraine international consultant Anna Lenchovska.

In the Spring 2014 issue of PastForward, Mukesh Kapila discusses the benefits and challenges of collecting testimonies in real time as events are unfolding.

The Problems Without Passports trip to Rwanda ends today after a busy second week that included visits to some of Rwanda’s most stunning nature sites and opportunities for the students to meet politicians and international representatives.

A forgotten forced labor camp for Jews in Czech Republic has been rediscovered as a result of research conducted in the Visual History Archive by Marcel Mahdal, a graduate of USC Shoah Foundation’s Teaching with Testimony in the 21st Century program.

Stephen Smith, executive director of the USC Shoah Foundation, presented USC Shoah Foundation’s educational work at the 9th annual International Conference on Holocaust Education at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem this week.

Dozens of Echoes and Reflections professional development seminars and workshops will be held across the country over the summer months, providing educators the opportunity to learn about teaching the Holocaust through testimony and the most up-to-date pedagogical strategies.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has paved the way for better Wi-Fi in schools by modernizing its E-Rate program, the nation’s largest program for supporting communications technology in schools and libraries.

The 53,000 testimonies in the Visual History Archive from the USC Shoah Foundation tell a complete personal history of life before, during and after the interviewee’s firsthand experience with genocide. These testimonies are an invaluable resource for humanity, as in addition to their experience through some of the darkest chapters of human history; the testimonies also recount happy memories of childhood and successes in life including careers, children and grandchildren. 

Steve Kay, dean of the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, believe that the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive holds many keys to unlocking the enigmatic conditions that have led to genocides throughout history.

Six months after it launched, the online guest book has gathered a remarkable collection of messages from people who have been affected by testimony. All are encouraged to sign the guest book until Dec. 31, 2014.

The University of Michigan- Flint held its second annual Workshop on Teaching and Working with Survivor Testimonies this week, which included exploration of Rwandan and Holocaust survivor testimonies.

On July 16 -17, 1942, over 13,000 Jews from Paris and its suburbs were rounded up by French police in the early morning hours and forcefully taken from their homes to both the Vélodrome d’Hiver, a winter cycling stadium in Paris, and to the Drancy internment camp.

Some of the brightest college students in applied mathematics are working with the USC Shoah Foundation this summer for the annual Research in Industrial Projects (RIPS) program at the UCLA Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM).

The statistics are rolling in: Thousands of rockets fired, thousands of homes destroyed, 65,000 reservists deployed, hundreds of Palestinian and tens of Israeli dead, miles of print, hours of commentary, two ceasefires. But for all our statistics, are we not missing one fundamental point? No one is suffering more at the hands of Hamas than the ordinary people of Gaza.

Development took a major step forward this month for New Dimensions in Testimony, the three-dimensional, fully interactive display of Holocaust survivors created by USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies and Conscience Display. Audiences had the chance to interact with the pilot for the first time.

Young people working to promote peace in Rwanda as part of the Aegis Trust Youth Champion program are turning to IWitness to aid in their projects.

The number of people who watched testimony in the 2013-14 fiscal year more than doubled from last year, USC Shoah Foundation’s year-end statistics reveal. And that’s just one of many impressive numbers that show how USC Shoah Foundation continues to grow its influence around the world.