Today we mourn the loss of Hanna Pankowsky, a remarkable woman who gave us her testimony and was one of the subjects in a portrait series of Holocaust survivors painted by David Kassan.

In 2019, the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research conducted deep and wide-ranging outreach, introducing the Visual History Archive to scholars, academic faculty, fellows, librarians, and students through in-depth workshops, demonstrations, consultations, and class introductions.

We are alarmed by the recent wave of antisemitic violence targeting the Orthodox Jewish communities in the New York region, including at least ten incidents in the past week, culminating in a mass stabbing at a Chanukah celebration within the Monsey home of Rabbi Chaim Rottenberg. We mourn for the victims and their families. A voice of conscience calls on all of us to take action against these heinous attacks.

About a month before the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, sparking World War II, a desperate Jewish father in Germany penned a letter in broken English to a friend in England, Mrs. Wolf.

 “I beg to inform you that we have got a refuse from the Aid Committee in London, owing to our high waiting number for America. … We are very discouraged by this answer and are now forced to get out our children as quick as possible.”

Alfons Lasker, an attorney in Breslau, was on a mission to get his two daughters – Anita and Renate – out of Germany. He did not succeed.