It Took 50 Years For Father and Son to Tell This Story Together

By: Julie Gruenbaum Fax

On an autumn day in 1998, Joel Poremba waited in a bedroom with his wife and infant son as his father sat in his Southern California living room with an interviewer from USC Shoah Foundation. This was the first time Nathan Poremba was talking about how he survived the Holocaust as a child.

Restless and curious, Joel snuck out and poked his head into the living room doorway.

Julie Gruenbaum Fax
Julie Gruenbaum Fax is a content strategist and writer for the USC Shoah Foundation. She was a senior writer and editor at the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles and has co-authored six personal history books. She is currently writing a book about her grandmother’s Holocaust experience.

Final Account Screening

Tuesday, July 1, 2025 - 10:01 PM PDT
Recently released by Focus Features, Final Account, the documentary from Participant Media, shares never-before-seen interviews with the last living generation of people to have participated in Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich. Filmed over a 10-year period, the timely documentary raises questions about authority, conformity, complicity, perpetration, national identity, and responsibility, as men and women—ranging from former SS members to civilians—reckon with their memories, perceptions, and personal appraisals of their role in the Holocaust.

My Name Is Sara Film Screening and Panel Discussion

Tuesday, July 1, 2025 - 10:01 PM PDT
In partnership with Aspen Film, the event series opens with a screening and special panel discussion of the award-winning feature film My Name Is Sara. The film is based on the true story of 13-year-old Sara Góralnik, who, after escaping a Jewish Ghetto in Poland and losing her family at the outset of the Holocaust, hides in plain sight, passing as an Orthodox Christian, and ultimately survives against all odds.

Rachael Cerrotti, author of We Share the Same Sky, in conversation with Lisa Hofheimer

Tuesday, July 1, 2025 - 10:01 PM PDT
​We Share the Same Sky weaves together the stories of these two young women--Hana as a refugee who remains one step ahead of the Nazis at every turn, and Rachael, whose insatiable curiosity to touch the past guides her into the lives of countless strangers, bringing her love and tragic loss. Throughout the course of her twenties, Hana's history becomes a guidebook for Rachael in how to live a life empowered by grief.

The Gift of a Friendship: Saying Goodbye to Rabbi Bent Melchior

By: Rachael Cerrotti, Storyteller in Residence

There is gratitude deep inside of grief. A feeling of, how lucky was I to have this friendship at all. That’s how I feel about my dear Rabbi Bent Melchior who passed away in Copenhagen on July 28, 2021. He was 92-years-old.

Rachael Cerrotti, Storyteller in Residence
Rachael Cerrotti is an award winning author, producer and documentary storyteller as well as the inaugural Storyteller in Residence for USC Shoah Foundation. She is the granddaughter behind 'We Share The Same Sky' and the host of 'The Memory Generation' podcast. Learn more at www.rachaelcerrotti.com.

New Partnership to Develop Holocaust Education Programming for Medical Community

USC Shoah Foundation and the Maimonides Institute for Medicine, Ethics and the Holocaust are partnering to develop new and innovative educational programing on medical ethics and the Holocaust.

The Holocaust marked a profound and sadistic deviation from traditional notions of medical ethics, with medical and scientific communities in the Third Reich actively participating in the labeling, persecution and eventual mass murder of millions deemed “unfit.”

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