In January 2015, I had the incredible opportunity to travel to Poland with other students, as a junior intern, for USC Shoah Foundation’s and Discovery Education’s Auschwitz: Past is Present program, commemorating the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.
Ruth Hernandez is a junior at Esperanza Academy Charter School, in Philadelphia, PA. Hernandez has been involved with USC Shoah Foundation since 2013, when her video Voices of Our Journey is the won 2013 IWitness Video Challenge. In 2015 she traveled to Poland for the Auschwitz: Past is Present program as a junior intern.
In January 2015, I traveled to Poland for the Auschwitz: Past is Present professional development program, commemorating the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau. This entire experience, was and continues to be a life changing event for me on every level personally, professionally, and academically.
A person doesn’t visit the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Poland and come away unchanged, and I was no exception.
The empty barracks, the barbed-wire fencing, the solemn exhibits, the telltale chimneys – all these vestiges left a strong impression. But what struck me most was the sheer vastness of the sprawling memorial to history’s most notorious death camp.
Walking through Birkenau with my tour group, I gaped at the emptiness stretching for a mile in every direction – nothing but the crumbling remains of buildings half-buried in snow.
What started out as a curious journey across the hall at Leavey Library turned into one of Marina Kay’s most passionate endeavors at USC.
Kay, currently a senior international relations major, was working on USC’s Interlibrary Loan & Document Delivery team at Leavey Library in summer 2014 when she became curious about one particular office that she always passed by in the library – USC Shoah Foundation. She had always been interested in learning about the Holocaust, so one day she decided to go inside, and asked if she could intern or volunteer.