Renderings of New Holocaust Museum in Orlando reveal “Beacon of Light” Dedicated to Survivor and Witness Testimonies

The Holocaust Memorial Resource and Education Center of Florida (HMREC) has unveiled architectural renderings of the new Holocaust Museum for Hope & Humanity in Orlando, Florida that will be the world’s first Holocaust museum designed around survivor and witness testimonies.

USC Shoah Foundation serves as a content and creative partner in the development of the new museum, the first time the Institute has teamed with a Holocaust Museum to design and implement a ground-up and permanent museum-wide exhibition.

Documentary Featuring Visual History Archive Testimony Ignites Debate over Accountability, Memory in Hungary

A powerful documentary that hinges on USC Shoah Foundation testimony raises difficult questions about how Hungary memorializes victims of the Nazi occupation and confronts its own role in wartime atrocities.

Released last year, filmmaker Dániel Ács’ Monument to the Murderers recounts the controversy surrounding a monument erected in Budapest in 2005 to honor local victims of World War II.

Harry Haft survived through his skills as a boxer for the entertainment of the Nazis in Auschwitz. Others imprisoned at the camp—including Benjamin Jacobs, a dentist—have mentioned in their testimonies that their professional usefulness to their captors may have saved their lives. Besides boxing, another form of entertainment for the Nazis at Auschwitz was the camp orchestra. The Visual History Archive has the testimonies of several musicians who recount their experiences playing in the orchestra.

Theary Seng

By: Eli Gruen

One morning in 1978, Theary Seng awoke alongside her younger brother in their prison cell in Boeng Rai Security Center, about 100 kilometers south of their hometown of Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The children’s mother had been in the cell the night before, but now she was gone. 

Eli Gruen

Four Siblings—Aged 95, 97, 99, and 100—Record “Last Chance Testimony” Stories of Survival

By: Julie Gruenbaum Fax

Sally (Fink) Singer still cries over the spilled milk. Yes, it happened more than 80 years ago. And at the age of 100, Sally knows that her siblings – Anne (99), Sol (97), and Ruth (95), who to this day remain inseparable – have long since forgiven her. But the pangs of guilt and hunger linger.

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.

New Partnership with NCFL Producing Testimony-based Educational Offerings to Support Family Literacy Skills

Modern day Kentucky and WWII-era Austria may seem worlds apart, but the far-flung locales and distant timeframes came together last month at a series of educational workshops at the Iroquois Branch Library in south Louisville.

Over the course of five weeks, a group of young children and their caregivers gathered each Saturday morning for a special educational series sponsored by the National Center for Families Learning (NCFL) and The Willesden Project, a program of USC Shoah Foundation and Hold On To Your Music Foundation, with support from the Koret Foundation. 

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