By spending a year in Los Angeles as USC Shoah Foundation’s Austrian Holocaust Memorial Service intern, Florian Köppl is fulfilling a lifelong dream.

Köppl is the 12th young man from Austria to work at USC Shoah Foundation as an alternative to his compulsory military service back home. The Austrian Holocaust Memorial Service, founded by Andreas Maislinger, places accepted applicants at Holocaust memorial institutions around the world, where they live and work for one year.

The program, especially placement at USC Shoah Foundation, is in such high demand that future interns must plan out their service three years in advance. Indeed, Köppl said he first got involved with the Austrian Holocaust Memorial Service (AHMS) in high school, about three years ago: visiting museums, going on trips and attending conferences and lectures put on by AHMS near his hometown of Grossraming, a small town in the countryside of Upper Austria.

He confessed that being part of AHMS was his main motivation for getting through high school. It has been his dream to live abroad in Los Angeles, and AHMS provided him the opportunity to do that.

However, the more he learned about the Holocaust, the more passionate he began to feel about his service and the memorial organization he would one day work for.

“When I got into this organization I saw that it’s a very interesting topic and also very important, especially for this time when there are less and less survivors, that such things never happen again,” Köppl said. “It’s really important work that the Shoah Foundation and other organizations like this do.”

Köppl’s main job duties at USC Shoah Foundation are working at the front desk, where he answers phone calls, responds to general inquiry emails, organizes mail and performs other administrative tasks, and assisting Ari Zev, director of administration, and other departments as needed. Recently, he has helped organize donations that are coming in for the upcoming Ambassadors for Humanity gala. Köppl said he also hopes to put on a Skype call with a Holocaust survivor for his former high school.

He has had the chance to watch testimony in the Visual History Archive already, and was very impressed by it, he said.

“Every survivor has a story to tell, and they are all so different. It’s amazing,” Köppl said.

With the goal of studying media and making documentary films, Köppl feels that working at USC Shoah Foundation for the next year and having the opportunity to travel will be a great personal experience. But he doesn’t quite know what to expect, and that’s just fine with him.

“I think it’s a good thing when you don’t know what’s coming,” he said.

Follow Florian’s year of adventure in Los Angeles and beyond at his blog, https://flowillbeback.wordpress.com.