I attended the event “Melodies of Auschwitz” at the Willard Intercontinental Hotel in Washington D.C. on Thursday, March 10, 2016, hosted by PNC Bank to recognize USC Shoah Foundation for its work in genocide education and preserving testimony of genocides around the world. The event was educational and meaningful, bringing together PNC clients, employees, and all other guests into a conversation about the importance of preserving testimony and what USC Shoah Foundation is all about.

While the average USC student was dragging themselves out of bed to make it to their first class after Spring Break, I was--rather jet-lagged--sitting in an 800 year old room cloaked in paintings of old intellectuals and world renowned writers in a tiny corridor of Hertford College at Oxford University, wondering how on Earth I could be so lucky to miss a week of school to hang out at one of the oldest, most prestigious centers of learning in the history of Western Civilization.

Steven Spielberg, founder of USC Shoah Foundation and director and co-producer of the film, says there has never been a more important time for students to see the historical period drama. “Hate is less parenthetical today, and it’s more a headline," he told Lester Holt of NBC Nightly News in an interview about the rerelease.

Roughly 1,000 audio-only interviews recorded by students of UCLA history Professor Richard Hovannisian were entrusted to USC Shoah Foundation. This week, Hovannisian and three of his former students gave a talk about how they amassed such a large repository of memory at so crucial a time, “when denialism was huge.”