Testimonies and Resistance at Treblinka: Reflections from 2020-2021 Breslauer, Rutman, and Anderson Research Fellow Chad Gibbs

The ACE Charitable Foundation has been a generous long-term supporter of the Institute’s work in Rwanda. Previously, the ACE Charitable Foundation provided multi-year support for the Institute’s partnership with Aegis Trust to use testimony as a learning tool to broaden the understanding of genocide’s lasting impacts and to motivate social change.

The late Erna Finci Viterbi shared a passion with her husband, Andrew, for helping people learn from the Holocaust to combat intolerance and the violence that stems from it. In November 2014, three months before Erna passed away, the Viterbis honored another person with that drive when they awarded Stephen D. Smith the inaugural Andrew J. and Erna Finci Viterbi USC Shoah Foundation Executive Director Chair.

With only some 200 remaining survivors of the Japanese military’s 1937 campaign of mass killing in Nanjing, China, firsthand memories might be lost to history if not for USC Shoah Foundation and its donors. “The Nanjing Testimony Project enables the world, through our web-based educational content, to learn about this heinous crime against humanity,” says Cecilia “Ceci” Chan, who initiated the strategy to fund and support the collection.

Next Generation Council member Thomas Melcher is a longstanding supporter of USC Shoah Foundation. His work to foster tolerance was reaffirmed by the terrorist attacks in Paris on November 13, 2015, when 130 people were murdered with hundreds more wounded. “I fear that the regularity of these events is slowly desensitizing us all,” he says.

Juliane Heyman’s story of escaping the Holocaust is as harrowing as the rest of her life has been inspirational. At age 12, she and her family were forced to flee their home in what is now Gdansk, Poland. In a scene that could have inspired The Sound of Music, she first had to perform in a violin recital so as not to raise suspicion.

The testimonies of Leon’s late parents, Sima and Rubin, in the Visual History Archive attest to the power of love and never giving up. Married before the war, the couple was torn apart when the Nazis sent them to separate camps. Miraculously, Rubin somehow kept his ring and, after the war, convinced an officer to take it to the nearby women’s camp, in the hope that Sima was alive and would recognize it. The couple soon reunited.

Melinda Goldrich had long known about USC Shoah Foundation’s dedication to collecting eyewitness experiences — her father, Jona, gave testimony. But it was not until early in 2015 that she learned the full range of the Institute’s educational outreach. Traveling to Poland as part of the Auschwitz: The Past is Present program inspired the Aspen, Colo., resident to visit the Institute to find out more about such programs as IWitness and New Dimensions in Testimony.

To honor his parents — now age 93 and 85 — Shapiro endowed the Sara and Asa Shapiro Annual Holocaust Testimony Scholar and Lecture Fund. The program it supports enables scholars to spend up to a month in residence at USC Shoah Foundation’s Center for Advanced Genocide Research. Each fellowship culminates in a public lecture.