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Learn more about the USC Shoah Foundation and its 30-year history.
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The Institute in the news
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.