The Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and the UMN School of Music had the pleasure of hosting Dr. Badema Pitic in March for a talk titled “Remembering Through Music: The Srebrenica Genocide in Bosnian izvorna Songs.” I had the opportunity to interview Dr. Pitic about her research on music, transitional justice, and reconciliation in post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina.
As of 2020, only 400,000 Holocaust survivors were still alive. Archivists, historians, and family members are working to capture their stories before they’re gone. The University of Southern California’s Shoah Foundation ois taking recording these survivor testimonies one step further.
Grandchildren of Holocaust survivors continue to share their families’ stories.
One of the oldest living groups of Holocaust survivor siblings have called Winnipeg home for decades. Now, they are sharing their stories, via the Last Chance Testimony Collection, part of the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive.
Most Holocaust survivors are in their 80s or 90s. With every year, fewer remain to tell us their stories. So museums and archives are using advanced technologies to preserve their testimonies and introduce them to new generations.
The foundation’s move to the blockchain is in partnership with Starling Lab, a nonprofit academic research center that’s on a mission to use decentralized ledgers to help preserve historical data of importance to humanity. Its lofty goal is to restore integrity both to data and to the internet itself—starting with some of the most precious information we have.
More than 2,300 testimonies collected by the Holocaust Documentation & Education Center in Dania Beach are now being added to Steven Spielberg’s USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive.
USC experts consider the importance of these photographs and paintings — bringing immediacy to history and conveying the human cost.
The last time Grebenschikoff saw Ana María Wahrenberg was in the spring of 1939, when they were 9 years old. They shared a tearful hug in a Berlin schoolyard before their families were forced to flee the country and the Nazis on the cusp of World War II.They both thought that would be their final hug. But on Nov. 5, after more than eight decades apart, the two women — now 91 years old — embraced once again.
Steven Spielberg’s U.S.C. Shoah Foundation, founded in 1994 to record survivors’ stories, is at the forefront of the evolution. In a 2018 New York Times article, Spielberg described the need to broaden the focus, saying: “The presence of hate has become taken for granted. We are not doing enough to counter it.”
At the start of 2020, the film was ready to be released in theaters, but the pandemic intervened, and The Survivor languished as the best Holocaust film that moviegoers couldn’t see. It’s now finally scheduled to have its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 13, but its future remains uncertain.
“The holographic likeness of Holocaust survivor Renee Firestone, 97, is part of a new exhibit at the Holocaust Museum Los Angeles, which reopens on Saturday more than a year after the pandemic forced museum doors closed.”
The April 27 event was initiated to celebrate Harvard making the Shoah Foundation’s visual history archive available to its community.
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — A St. Pete woman is reunited with her best friend after fleeing Nazi Germany more than 80 years ago.
More than 80 years ago, two young girls in Germany were separated by the Holocaust. The friends said their goodbyes and fled from the Nazis. Betty Grebenschikoff and her family moved to Shanghai, China, and then the United States. Her friend Annemarie Wahrenberg moved to Chile. The two friends never saw each other again — until a recent, emotional reunion.
Every Sunday, Betty Grebenschikoff and Ana María Wahrenberg have a scheduled phone call. They often lose track of time talking, as best friends tend to do. The weekly calls are only a recent ritual. In fact, just four months ago, both women believed the other had died in the Holocaust.
"But we shouldn't have an outright ban on deepfakes for satire or freedom of expression. And the growing commercial use of the technology is very promising, such as turning movies into different languages, or creating engaging educational videos," says Professor Sandra Wachter, a senior research fellow in AI at Oxford University. One such educational use of AI-generated videos is at the University of Southern California's Shoah Foundation, which houses more than 55,000 video testimonies from Holocaust survivors.
Tune into 1 hour 57 seconds of the radio broadcast to hear an interview with USC Shoah Foundation indexer Ita Gordon, who played a part in helping reunite survivors Ana María Wahrenberg and Betty Grebenschikoff, and hear the two childhood friends talk about their first meeting after 80 years.
Two elderly Jewish women who were best friends as children in 1930s Berlin have been reunited after 82 years thanks to a Holocaust researcher who recognized a connection in interviews they gave in different countries.
82 years after fleeing Nazi Germany with their families, two childhood friends are brought together by USC Shoah Foundation researcher who ‘linked’ their testimony.