In a five-hour interview with USC Shoah Foundation, Justus Rosenberg refers to himself as “small fry,” “a cog,” an unimportant person. And perhaps it was for this reason that for decades, the Bard College literature professor hadn’t let on—to his colleagues, to his students, and even, for a time, to his own wife—that he had fought and outwitted the Nazis during World War II to save thousands from persecution.

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.

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 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.

USC Shoah Foundation is saddened to learn about the passing of Max Glauben, a child survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, the Majdanek and Dachau concentration camps, and a veteran of the United States Army. In 2018, Max was interviewed by USC Shoah Foundation, in association with the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum—a center he helped found—for the interactive Dimensions in Testimony exhibit. He recorded his original video testimony for USC Shoah Foundation in Dallas, Texas in 1996.

The Institute mourns the passing of members of our community in 2022, including survivors who have given testimony, Joe Adamson, Helen Fagin, Sigmund Burke, Vera Gissing, Gerda Weissmann Klein, Bill Harvey, Max Glauben, Max Eisen, Phillip Maisel, Edward Mosberg, Judah Samet and Robert Clary.