Hannah Lessing represents Austrian society’s desire to atone. Her unique job involves, among other things, tracking down Austrian Holocaust survivors or their kin – inside the country and out – to offer financial reparations.

Lessing, the secretary general of the National Fund of the Republic of Austria for Victims of National Socialism, came to USC Shoah Foundation this week to discuss a potential collaborative project with the Institute.

It started with a group of students in a Volkswagen van, traveling around Fresno with bulky tape recorders at the behest of their professor.

It became the world’s largest known collection of oral histories from survivors of the 1915 Armenian Genocide at the hands of the Ottoman Turks.

The news about a group of teenagers throwing a Nazi salute at a party in Orange County is a startling reminder that knowledge of the Holocaust is fading. Here are four free online classroom-ready activities on IWitness that address the topics of antisemitism, bystanders and hatred.

The piece highlights how the interactive biographies will enable future generations to ask questions of and receive immediate answers from pre-recorded images of Holocaust survivors, long after the last of the living witnesses are gone.