As a little kid, Toni Nickel never could settle between Sesame Street and the History Channel, her interest in other people’s stories of war piqued such that learning the colors and the order of the numbers became forever secondary. Her curiosity – specifically in the Holocaust – came to a head in college when she took a History of the Holocaust course that used the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive. There, in a classroom at Texas A&M University, Nickel knew her fate and future were sealed.

Nickel is now a graduating senior at Texas A&M University at College Station, using her brief experience in-house at USC Shoah Foundation in Leavey Library, her background as a summer docent at the Holocaust Museum in Houston and all that she’s learned taking classes toward a double major in international studies and history to complete a senior thesis and eventually apply to law school.

“What I’ve tried to do in my thesis is create a narrative of the experience of Kinder [Jewish children] during the Kindertransport while highlighting the specific women and organization who facilitated the transport,” Nickel said. “I found that women, in many cases, were the keystones in the bridge between Nazi Germany and safety – they were the mothers who got their Kinder onto transport, or they were the women who were fearlessly standing before parliament, advocating for the rescue of Kinder.”

The first-ever USC Shoah Foundation intern at Texas A&M, Nickel earned that distinction after her coursework and advisor Dr. Adam Seipp led her to her university’s Hillel organization, which was partnered with USC Shoah Foundation. As an intern, Nickel gained advanced access to the Visual History Archive, and was able to spend a week in-house at Leavey Library, utilizing the resources of the Institute. Following the internship, which was part of a greater three-year initiative to support a teaching fellow and an intern at Texas A&M under the A.I. and Manet Schepps Foundation, Nickel continued to work with the Visual History Archive as a principal source for her research and thesis project.

“The testimonies functioned as my primary method for understanding the perceptions of Kinder,” Nickel said. “I saw that in testimonies I was looking at, the way women were represented by the Kinder was a lot more descriptive – the Kinder were talking about women with significantly more descriptive prose, and when they were describing men, they weren’t as descriptive. I wanted to know why this was such a common occurrence.”

Using testimony from the Visual History Archive and other secondary sources from her courses and outside research, Nickel found that, in examining every organization that facilitated Kindertransport, “there were very few instances where there wasn’t a woman making things happen, and this is something that’s not very well-documented especially when you’re looking at it on a macro level.” That is, historians can isolate specific women as important to the study of the Holocaust, but neglected to document the sheer number of women prominently involved in saving many thousands of children in as visible a sphere as deserved.

“USC Shoah Foundation has provided an extraordinary amount of material and assistance in the development of this project,” Nickel said. “Working as a docent intern at the Holocaust Museum of Houston, it was hard to have a one-size-fits-all story when trying to engage a group. Something that I found with the Visual History Archive is that it is almost one-size-fits-all, because it’s everybody’s individual stories and there’s so many little details you can find within each testimony that will make that testimony relatable to whoever is watching.”

That relatability and engagement is what sustained Nickel’s interest in the Holocaust and commitment to her project, her understanding of the value of testimony and recording history grown with every new video.

“I don’t think that understanding the Holocaust is something you can do without engaging in testimony,” Nickel said. “It was really inspiring to see that USC Shoah Foundation is able to maintain those histories and those stories for my children and grandchildren and future educators and students of the world to be able to continue to engage in the history and engage in testimony. Because numbers don’t do the Holocaust justice.”

With her thesis project almost behind her now, Nickel plans to take a gap year this upcoming year to work with a non-profit wherein she can continue to engage with people and their stories, the individual human experiences that exist in this world. She intends to use what she learns in the interim to go to a law school with a JDPhD or JDLLM program.

Nickel hopes to keep engaging with the Visual History Archive following university, and to continue introducing it to colleagues: “I found that the majority [of my classmates, when using the Visual History Archive] had a similar experience to my own in that there were things we’d learned in the text books or things we’d learned in reading memoirs that were of course impactful – but once we engaged with the testimony, through the Visual History Archive, it became more real and more human. It wasn’t just reading words on a page or seeing a picture on the back of a book of the person who had written it. It was seeing their faces and hearing the silence that comes with such an impactful story, and I’m very appreciative of the Visual History Archive and USC Shoah Foundation for providing it as a resource to students like myself.”