Mission to Hungary and Poland Will Commemorate USC Shoah Foundation’s 20th Anniversary

A delegation of USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education supporters and board members will travel to Hungary and Poland this October to commemorate the Institute’s 20th anniversary and learn more about its work in Eastern Europe.

Testimonies from the Institute’s Visual History Archive, its database of 52,000 audiovisual testimonies of survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust and other genocides, will guide participants through Jewish life prior to the war, the events of the Holocaust, liberation and rescue, and life after the war.

During the eight-day mission, the group will visit historic Jewish cultural sites and Holocaust memorials and take part in a guided, in-depth tour of Auschwitz- Birkenau concentration camps. Participants will meet Holocaust survivors and witnesses who will provide a first-hand account of this period of history.  Finally, they will have the opportunity to meet local educators and students by participating in classroom lessons which use testimonies from the Visual History Archive.

 “The mission will focus on the people of the Holocaust, allowing their stories to guide us through history,” said USC Shoah Foundation executive director Stephen Smith. “It will also focus on learning more about USC Shoah Foundation’s work on the ground in these two countries and the context in which we work, by hearing from educators and students using testimony from our VHA and seeing how we impact real lives.”

The Visual History Archive allows users to search through and view nearly 52,000 audiovisual testimonies of survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust and other genocides. These testimonies were conducted in 57 countries and in 33 languages.