USC Shoah Foundation and Discovery Education today launched the fourth annual Stronger Than Hate Challenge offering students the opportunity to win $10,000 in prizes. The challenge encourages students aged 13-18 in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada to work individually or in groups of 2-4 on multimedia projects that demonstrate the power of story to create a community that is stronger than hate.

For much of their life, Allen and Peter Adamson didn't know that Joe, their easy-going, suburbanite dad, a VP at a New York plastics company, had a remarkable early history. He had escaped Germany at the age of 14 on the Kindertransport, served as an interrogator with the U.S. Army during the liberation of Mauthausen Concentration Camp, and helped in a U.S. effort to intercept secret messages encoded in German postage stamps.

Making DiT accessible at no-cost to educators and students through IWitness provides students anywhere in the world with the opportunity to have a conversational experience with survivors of the Holocaust and other witnesses to history. And at the Holocaust & Genocide Centres in Johannesburg and Durban, that’s exactly what students did, with a total of 400 learners interfacing with an interactive recorded video of Pinchas, a Jewish survivor of six Nazi concentration camps.

We at USC Shoah Foundation are saddened to hear of the passing of our beloved friend, Holocaust survivor and renowned artist Alice Lok Cahana, who passed away on November 28 at age 88. Through her internationally acclaimed artwork, writings, and public speaking, Alice put forth a message to the world that both memorialized those who perished during the Holocaust and celebrated the strength of the human spirit.

We are sad to learn of the passing of Kurt Messerschmidt, Holocaust survivor, educator and beloved cantor. He was 102. Messerschmidt was born Jan. 2, 1915 in Weneuchen, Germany, but moved to Berlin in 1918 and excelled as a linguistics scholar, gymnast and musician. He was well-respected and a leader among his classmates and teachers, but was unable to attend college because of anti-Jewish measures implemented by the Nazis.

USC Shoah Foundation is sorry to learn of the passing of Aleksander Laks, the first Holocaust survivor to give his testimony to USC Shoah Foundation in Brazil and a special friend of the Institute. Laks passed away July 21 at age 88. Laks survived the Lodz Ghetto, Auschwitz and a death march as a teenager. He immigrated to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and became a leader of the survivor community there as president of the Sherit Hapleita (Holocaust survivors’ organization).

USC Shoah Foundation is saddened to learn of the passing of Johnny Strange, a record-holding adventurer and supporter of USC Shoah Foundation.

USC Shoah Foundation is saddened to learn of the passing of Erna Viterbi, philanthropist and longtime supporter of USC Shoah Foundation. Erna Finci Viterbi, a descendant of Sephardic Jews, was born in Sarajevo but fled Yugoslavia with her family during World War II. They were deported to the Parma region of Italy and interned in the village Gramignazzo di Sissa, but were saved from deportation to the extermination camps by the townspeople. Erna and her family were able to escape to Switzerland for the rest of the war. In 1950, they moved to California.

We are sad to learn of the passing of Thomas Blatt, a Holocaust survivor who was one of the few people to survive an escape from the Sobibor death camp in 1943. He was 88. Born April 15, 1927, in Lublin, Poland, Blatt also served as a witness at the 2009 trial of the camp guard John Demjanjuk.

  Call for Applications   Beth and Arthur Lev Student Research Fellowship Summer 2022  

We stand with our programmatic partners in both Ukraine and Russia who continue the hard work of building more tolerant communities by educating about the horrors of the Holocaust and the consequences of unchecked hatred.  We are deeply disturbed by Russian President Vladimir Putin's call to "denazify" Ukraine—a country with a Jewish president who lost family members in the Holocaust—and by his unfounded claim that the military incursion was justified by “genocide” in Ukraine.

We are sad to learn of the passing of Helen Colin, a Holocaust survivor who had the distinction of being the first survivor to speak on camera after being liberated from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

USC Shoah Foundation is saddened to learn of the passing of Holocaust survivor Curt Lowens, a wartime hero who became a well-known character actor when he moved to the United States. He was 91. Born Curt Lowenstein on Nov. 17, 1925 in Germany, Lowen and his family had planned to emigrate to the United States as World War II was starting, but they were stopped from leaving the Netherlands when the Germans invaded that country. He was briefly deported to the Westerbork concentration camp in 1943, but he was released because of his father’s business connections.

USC Shoah Foundation is sad to learn of the passing of Sir Nicholas Winton, the organizer of the Czechoslovakian Kindertransport and one of the most beloved rescuers of the Holocaust. Winton was 106 years old.

To honor this remarkable man and visionary scholar, the Institute gratefully re-posts his profile below. During the brief week that Harry spent with us here in Los Angeles this past July as our inaugural Rutman Teaching Fellow, he managed to touch and inspire all of our staff and friends of the Institute who worked with him and who heard his public lecture.

Lilia Tomchuk, a PhD candidate at the Fritz Bauer Institute at Goethe University Frankfurt, has been awarded the 2021-2022 Margee and Douglas Greenberg Research Fellowship at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research. She will be in residence at the Center in Spring 2022 in order to conduct research for her dissertation, which is entitled “Dimensions of Jewish Women's Experiences During the Holocaust in Occupied Ukraine.”

Charlotte Kiechel, a Ph.D. candidate in Global History at Yale University, has been awarded the 2021-2022 USC Shoah Foundation Robert J. Katz Research Fellowship in Genocide Studies. She will be in residence at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research in Spring 2022 to conduct research related to her dissertation, which is entitled “The Politics of Comparison: Holocaust Memory and Visions of ‘Third World’ Suffering, 1950-1995.”

Barnabas Balint, a PhD candidate at Magdalen College at the University of Oxford, UK, has been awarded the 2021-2022 Breslauer, Rutman, and Anderson Research Fellowship at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research. He will be in residence at the Center during Spring 2022 in order to conduct research for his dissertation, which is entitled “Accelerated Development into Adulthood: The Changing Roles of Young Hungarians During the Holocaust.”

“Redress for Linguistic Genocide in Canada” Lorena Sekwan Fontaine (University of Winnipeg/San Diego State University) February 17, 2022

As the world watches in horror as millions of Ukrainians resist, take shelter or flee from Russian attacks, news reports stir up connections to a haunting past. We scanned our Visual History Archive to bring just a few stories from these places to light. The words of survivors, as they often do, reach forward through time.

Today is International Women’s Day and this year we are honoring girls—from Holocaust Europe to Africa, from Central America to the Middle East, from occupied China to pre-war Armenia—who demonstrated extraordinary strength and resilience in the face of unimaginable horrors. Here is a selection of USC Shoah Foundation clips and films to mark the occasion.

Two weeks into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, USC Shoah Foundation is extremely concerned for its partners, survivors and friends in both countries and strongly condemns the senseless loss of life. USC Shoah Foundation has strong roots in Ukraine, having conducted 3,432 interviews in the country that form the basis for a collection of testimony-based educational programs that have reached tens of thousands of Ukrainian teachers and students.

The Starling Lab for Data Integrity (Starling Lab) today announced its inaugural class of Starling Journalism research fellows. The annual fellowship helps leading journalists from around the world use the latest advances in cryptography and Web3 technologies to protect the integrity and safety of digital content, as well as individuals working in and around the media. In an era of rampant mis- and disinformation, this timely program will apply in-field research to explore how to restore trust in digital media and underscore the legacy values of journalism.

USC Shoah Foundation mourns the passing of Holocaust survivor and accomplished structural engineer Sigmund Burke, who died February 6, 2022 at nearly 98 years old. He recorded his testimony with USC Shoah Foundation in 2019, at the age of 95, as part of the Last Chance Testimony Collection initiative, USC Shoah Foundation’s race-against-time effort to record the stories and perspectives of the last remaining Holocaust survivors.

USC Shoah Foundation is now accepting applications for rising 8th–12th grade students across the country to participate in its highly competitive week-long summer program, Leadership Workshop – Action and Values.

USC Shoah Foundation mourns the passing of our friend Helen Fagin, who has passed away in Sarasota, Florida at age 104. A Holocaust survivor, English professor and director of Judaic Studies at the University of Miami, Helen received numerous awards over her long career for her work in promoting tolerance, and in 1994 was invited by President Clinton to be on the advisory board for the World War II Memorial.

More than 18,000 students and 250 teachers from school districts across Georgia last week experienced famed pianist Mona Golabek's livestreamed performance adapted from her acclaimed book, The Children of Willesden Lane. Produced in an exciting new format by Discovery Education in partnership with USC Shoah Foundation, the special theatrical and musical Willesden READS event gave students and educators the opportunity to interact with Mona as she brought to life the inspiring story of her mother and Holocaust survivor, Lisa Jura. 

Alan Rose was repeating himself. He was stuck in a particularly difficult part of his story about being deported from a labor camp to Buchenwald Concentration Camp. Josh Turnil and the guests he had invited to hear Alan’s story in Josh’s Paris living room that January 2019 evening – about 20 people of all ages tucked into sofas and folding chairs – gently helped Alan along. After Alan had finished speaking, Josh’s teenage son sat at the piano and played a slow, jazzy melody with a repeating refrain that reflected the circularity of memory.

USC Shoah Foundation continues to record interviews with Holocaust survivors as part of the Last Chance Testimony Collection initiative, an urgent effort to give voice to survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust with the goal of educating people around the globe.

USC Shoah Foundation mourns the passing of our friend Vera Gissing, who died March 12 in Berkshire, England at age 93. Vera will be remembered for her extraordinary life, which included escaping Prague in 1939 on one of the last Kindertransport trains to make it out of Czechoslovakia before the outbreak of World War II.