Toni Nickel is preparing for a career of teaching the Holocaust by serving as the first-ever USC Shoah Foundation intern at Texas A&M University.

The A.I. and Manet Schepps Foundation funded a three-year, $75,000 initiative to support a teaching fellow and intern at Texas A&M. The fellowship will instruct professors on ways to integrate the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive of Holocaust and other genocide survivors’ testimonies into their teaching.

The donation also funds the nation’s first Holocaust Education internship, under the supervision of Rabbi Matt Rosenberg, executive director of Texas A&M Hillel. The selected student intern serves as a liaison between the Texas A&M community and the USC Shoah Foundation, publicizing the resources available from the Visual History Archive to students, faculty, administration and the general public.

Nickel is a rising junior double majoring in international studies and anthropology and minoring in history and German. She said her interest in history started young, when her parents would alternate between Sesame Street and the History Channel. She was fascinated by history and especially the Holocaust because it illustrates, she said, “why people do what they do.” It shows humanity at its extremes: the very best and the very worst.

“The Holocaust depicts the best situations and the worst situations people have ever been in,” Nickel said. “People found true humanity, hope and love, and also the lack of humanity, hope and love.”

When she took an honors history course about the Holocaust her freshman year, Nickel said she saw how the students who had really engaged with the material were forever changed by it. Her decision to teach the Holocaust one day was cemented when she met a Holocaust survivor for the first time while interning as a summer docent at the Holocaust Museum Houston.

“My goal in life is to change someone for the better – to be a net positive in the world,” Nickel said.

Since starting her internship at the Texas A&M Hillel this semester, Nickel has helped organize a panel discussion of genocide survivors, led a 24-hour reading of names of Holocaust victims for Yom HaShoah, and set up a Holocaust memorial in the campus student center.

She has spent the last two days visiting USC Shoah Foundation in Los Angeles – learning about the Visual History Archive, meeting with members of DEFY, USC Shoah Foundation’s student association, and preparing for her own research projects.

Next year, Nickel plans to organize more speaker events and the Yom HaShoah commemoration. She also wants to do a movie series at Hillel which would incorporate testimony clips from the Visual History Archive. She’ll also take the course taught by the USC Shoah Foundation Texas A&M Teaching Fellow, Adam Siepp.

Nickel said testimony makes the stories of genocide survivors timeless, and the Visual History Archive ensures that none of these stories will ever be lost. When she is a professor, she hopes to show testimony to her students to teach them that even if something as catastrophic as genocide happens to you, you can still be a good person with a positive spirit.

“The human mind can’t conceptualize things so horrible [that genocide survivors went through], but you can live through them,” Nickel said. “You can’t watch a testimony and not be moved.”