We are sad to learn of the passing of Thomas Blatt, a Holocaust survivor who was one of the few people to survive an escape from the Sobibor death camp in 1943. He was 88.Born April 15, 1927, in Lublin, Poland, Blatt also served as a witness at the 2009 trial of the camp guard John Demjanjuk.

When it’s time for Kathleen Ralf’s class on Genocide and Human Rights to begin, her students log in from their homes all over the world. This semester, they were all able to take part in a common project through IWitness.

USC Shoah Foundation is sorry to learn of the passing of Aleksander Laks, the first Holocaust survivor to give his testimony to USC Shoah Foundation in Brazil and a special friend of the Institute. Laks passed away July 21 at age 88.Laks survived the Lodz Ghetto, Auschwitz and a death march as a teenager. He immigrated to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and became a leader of the survivor community there as president of the Sherit Hapleita (Holocaust survivors’ organization).

Nearly 20 years ago, talent manager and producer Steve Sauer was having a business lunch with Tony Thomopoulos, then-president of Amblin Television. Thomopoulos knew that Sauer’s parents were Holocaust survivors, so he asked Sauer if they had recorded their testimonies for Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation yet.

When Serena Dykman was four years old, her grandmother Maryla Michalowski-Dyamant recorded her testimony for USC Shoah Foundation. After Maryla described her experiences – she was deported from Bedzin, Poland, to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where she was forced to work as Dr. Josef Mengele’s translator, and survived a death march to Ravensbuck and Malchow concentration camps – the interviewer asked if there was anything she wanted to say to her granddaughter, Serena.Maryla said she hoped Serena “does everything so it doesn’t happen again.”

Aleksandra Visser started out as an aspiring cellist. Now, she’s researching Holocaust survivors for USC Shoah Foundation’s New Dimensions in Testimony project.Visser majored in music performance as an undergraduate at USC – she started studying cello at age seven – but when she realized she didn’t want to be a professional cellist, she decided to return to USC for a second bachelor’s degree in history.

Though they haven’t entered high school yet, Lauren Fenech is making sure her students understand the steps that can lead to genocide.In her eighth grade language arts class at Inverness Middle School in Florida earlier this week, Fenech led her students in USC Shoah Foundation’s Pyramid of Hate activity. The activity integrates first-person testimonies from the Institute's Visual History Archive with the Pyramid of Hate, a curricular tool developed by the Anti-Defamation League for its A WORLD OF DIFFERENCE® Institute.

The stories are truly harrowing.One man watched as his house was burned down – with his baby brother inside. Another man’s grandfather literally died protecting him from attacking soldiers, and women tried to make themselves “ugly” so they wouldn’t be raped.These are survivors of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre that USC Shoah Foundation interviewed for its Nanjing Massacre collection in the Visual History Archive. Since 2014, a total of 30 interviews have been collected and integrated into the Visual History Archive.

Leslie Rheingold uses IWitness to teach one of the only yearlong Holocaust studies courses offered in her school district in south Florida.At Cypress Bay High School, Rheingold teaches five Holocaust studies classes, made up of 10th-12th graders. She uses IWitness, Echoes and Reflections, literature and other media to teach about the Jewish experience throughout the year, but her students are currently doing research in IWitness on a different unit: groups other than Jews who were persecuted during the Holocaust.