For Armenian Family, Genocide Testimony Changes Lives, Community

By: Julie Gruenbaum Fax

In March of 1989, Dr. Sharon Aroian-Poiser traveled to Armenia to help children recover from the trauma of the 6.8 earthquake that crumbled 250 villages and killed tens of thousands of people just a few months before.

But the children, following the lead of the adults around them, remained silent -- until the day Aroian-Poiser pulled out her tape-recorder and demonstrated how it worked.

Almost immediately, the children lined up, and in formal recitation, one after another, told the tape recorder about the day their world collapsed.

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.

Teaching Film with Testimony Webinar

Tuesday, July 1, 2025 - 07:24 AM PDT
USC Shoah Foundation’s Teaching Film with Testimony is a multi-faceted interdisciplinary program that offers educators (K-16) best practices and access to a suite of educational resources for using both film and audiovisual testimony from survivors and witnesses to genocide to support student learning.
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