Holocaust liberator Shiro Takeshita describes being in the Salinas State Assembly Center (Japanese internment camp) and seeing an old man killed by a guard simply for being too close to the camp fence.

In this clip, Justus Rosenberg also recalls his impression of American journalist and rescuer Varian Fry.

Justus Rosenberg worked with Varian Fry to rescue more than 1,000 artists and intellectuals as part of the Emergency Rescue Committee. In this clip, Rosenberg expresses frustration at having to turn away many others. Read more about Justus Rosenberg

World War II liberator William McKinney describes the need for communities to come together.

In this event Hosted by USC Shoah Foundation, in partnership with Writer's Bloc and Holocaust Museum LA, Batalion unveils countless stories of ingenuity, ferocity, and daring by girls and young women who fought the Nazis in Hitler’s ghettos in Poland. They blew up trains. They smuggled food and guns. They distributed false papers. They built bombs from a recipe unearthed in an old Russian pamphlet. They bought munitions. They spied.

Eva (Geiringer) Schloss was 15 on January 27, 1945, the day the Soviet army first entered Auschwitz. But, she says, as the war raged on and uncertainty persisted, survival was a struggle even after liberation. Read about and view behind-the-scenes photos of Eva’s interactive biography for Dimensions in Testimony, an interview  that took more than 100 hours to capture with 3D technology.

In his interactive biography taken in 2014, Pinchas asks today’s youth to be accepting and tolerant of one another.

In his 1994 testimony, Mel recounts how he won a lawsuit in the 1980s against a group of Holocaust deniers who run the Institute for Historical Review in southern California. Watch his full testimony on the Visual History Archive Online.

In this excerpt from his testimony, a Srebrenica genocide survivor Smajil Klempić recalls the ordeal of Bosnian Muslim men who left Srebrenica after its capture on July 11, 1995 and embarked on a long and dangerous journey through the surrounding woods to reach safety. In this segment, he describes this column being attacked by Bosnian Serb forces while resting at the edge of a forest to prepare to cross an open field. More than 10,000 Bosnian Muslim men embarked on this journey in 1995. Only around 3,000 of them reached safety, some as late as September 1995.

March 1, 2022, Russian forces damaged buildings at the Babi Yar Memorial in Kyiv, Ukraine, dedicated to the memory of 100,000 Ukrainians murdered at the site during Nazi occupation. Among them were nearly 34,000 Jewish men, women, and children, killed over the course of two days on the eve of Yom Kippur in 1941. In this clip, Lyudmila Tkach recalls surviving the Babi Yar massacre.

Emiliia Kessler grew up in Khmel'nik, then part of Soviet Ukraine. She recalls the complex tensions between the Russians, the Ukrainians and the Jewish community that were part of everyday life in the 1930s. Related With Ukraine under attack, we stand by our programmatic partners in Ukraine and Russia working to  build more tolerant communities.

Alex Redner was 11 years old when the German army began bombarding his hometown of Lviv (then Lwow) on Sept. 1, 1939. Less than three weeks later, the Red Army occupied the city. Related With Ukraine under attack, we stand by our programmatic partners in Ukraine and Russia working to  build more tolerant communities.

Dr. Edith Eger, Auschwitz survivor and psychologist, describes the internal work she has engaged in to move past her experiences, and to share her experiences with others.

Dr. Edith Eger, Auschwitz survivor and psychologist, describes the power of passing her story on to future generations.  

In this clip from her testimony, Erika Gold recalls her fond memories of her favorite room in her childhood house, the living room, especially during Shabbat.

Narcisse Gasimba, a Tutsi survivor of the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda, describes Aminadab Birara, the leader of a resistance group in the mountains of Bisesero. 

Hanna Bokor’s testimony, given to USC Shoah Foundation in 1999, features prominently in the Hungarian documentary Monument to the Murderers. Here she describes what happened after she was arrested—at the age of 19 and eight months pregnant—by Arrow Cross militia in Budapest.

In this clip from her testimony, Mania recalls learning on May 8, 1945, that the war was over and how she felt about a dream come true.

This talk examines the facets of Jewish women's agency in different contexts during the Holocaust in Transnistria, where Jews and Roma from Bessarabia and Bukovina were deported by Romanian authorities in 1941 and 1942 and where local Ukrainian Jews were brought from neighboring localities.