It’s a story my grandfather never told me, something that I only heard and understood later, years after my mother recounted it. In 1943, after his first wife and children were killed, my grandfather, Sam Wasserman, participated in one of the only successful mass escapes from a Nazi extermination camp. He and hundreds of other prisoners, overwhelmed and killed several guards and escaped the Sobibor death camp in Poland. My grandfather eluded capture, joined a band of partisans fighting the Nazis, and shortly after surviving the war, met the woman who would become my grandmother.

As an interpreter at Nuremberg, Edith Coliver had a front-row seat to many historic moments, such as the testimony of Hermann Göring, creator of the Gestapo.

Editor’s Note: Jamalida, a Rohingya survivor, begins our Genocide Awareness Month focus on new testimony collections in the Visual History Archive. Her testimony and others will be featured in an upcoming special CNN initiative to highlight Rohingya testimony and experiences on their digital platforms.

From a camp in Bangladesh, Rohingya refugee Jamalida squarely faces the camera and recounts a horrific sequence of events that beset the 27-year-old mother of two when she first went public about her persecution at the hands of the Myanmar military.

Kathryn Brackney, the 2017-2018 Katz Research Fellow in Genocide Studies, gave a public lecture on the research she conducted during her month in residence at the Center.