By Eric Lindberg

USC School of Social Work

As an adoptee from Taiwan growing up in San Antonio, Texas, Priscilla Hefley struggled to find her identity.

To avoid being seen as an outsider, she embraced the mainstream culture. It wasn’t until college that she began to reconnect with her roots and what it meant to be a Chinese American.

“Adoptees can have a sense of not really being American and not really being Chinese,” she said. “It was a real struggle. Where exactly do I fit?”

At the end of each interview the Institute recorded for the Archive, the interviewer would ask the interviewee if he or she had a special message for future generations watching the interview. The survivors and other witnesses often spoken about such themes as forgiveness, the importance of individual action, and the need to teach children tolerance. Here are a few messages from the Institute's Archive.

Several people responded to active discrimination by helping the victims in different ways. This is a collection of clips highlighting testimony from survivors and aid givers themselves. One question that sometimes emerges in these clips is "what made you stand up to discrimination and racial intolerance?"

A series of clips from survivors speaking about their experiences with personal as well as institutional forms of discrimination. These clips include testimonies from the European Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide, and the Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda collections.