With the 2015 Ambassadors for Humanity Gala in Detroit just a month away, local students experienced IWitness in their own backyard, at the Henry Ford Museum.

United States Armed Forces veteran Leonard Lubin fought on the western front and liberated concentration camps in Austria. After war ended in Europe he waited along with his comrades to be deployed to the Pacific. He describes hearing about the atomic bombing of Japan and that war had ended in WWII when Japan surrendered to the Allies on August 15, 1945.

Zach Albert’s journey to USC Shoah Foundation to work as an indexer on the Jewish Family and Children’s Services (JFCS) of San Francisco Holocaust testimony collection began when he was 12 years old and preparing for his bar mitzvah.Albert was volunteering at the Dallas Holocaust Museum and had become totally captivated by the survivors he met there – they were like his surrogate grandparents, he said. When it came time for him to decide on a community service project for his bar mitzvah, he noticed that the museum was lacking something important: a Torah scroll.