As the curator of the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall, Zhu Chengshan is an influential figure in the study of the Nanjing Massacre. But he is also distinguished as one of the most prominent scholars of Chinese history, museum studies and peace-building.

Oriana Packer teaches college prep freshman English and honors junior language and composition at Brockton High School in Brockton, Mass. Her junior class completed the IWitness Video Challenge, which asks students to create videos showing how they were inspired by testimony to create positive change in their communities. What attracted you to IWitness? Why did you want to use it in your classroom?

English and composition teacher Oriana Packer, of Brockton High School in Brockton, Mass., assigned her junior students the IWitness Video Challenge. Here, three of them share what it was like to watch testimony for the first time. (In the photo, left to right: Kweku Quansah, Lucia Ugbesia, Alexandra Eugene, Oriana Packer) When did you first learn about the Holocaust?

Ian McAvoy teaches English and Film Arts at University City High School in San Diego, Calif. He learned about IWitness after visiting the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust with his class. He said the IWitness Video Challenge appealed to him because his students could use the website’s editing tools largely independently, and it would require them to synthesize their diverse learning about the Holocaust (via testimony, the museum trip, Elie Wiesel’s Night, and history classes) while encouraging altruism.

For Alessandro Marazzi Sassoon, last summer’s Problems Without Passports trip to Rwanda was an opportunity to take the study of post-genocide society one step further. Sassoon ’14 is an international relations major at the University of Southern California, concentrating on foreign policy analysis and security studies. After growing up in New York and Paris and completing a study abroad trip to Sweden, Finland and Russia, Sassoon was excited to visit central Africa for the first time.

Anoush Krikorian was interviewed by the filmmaker J. Michael Hagopian over 10 years ago about his experiences as a survivor of the Armenian Genocide. Now, Krikorian’s granddaughter is working to make sure his voice, and the voices of over 400 other survivors, are preserved in one of USC Shoah Foundation’s newest collections.

By the time Lorry Black finishes his dissertation, the music of the Holocaust may very well be brought back to life. Black is finishing his first semester as a doctoral student in sacred music at the USC Thornton School of Music. He was one of USC Shoah Foundation’s summer 2013 research fellows, conducting research in the Visual History Archive for his dissertation about the music of French concentration camps during the Holocaust.

Paulin Ndahayo is quickly proving to be one of the newest and most passionate ambassadors of IWitness in Rwanda. Ndahayo teaches political education and literature at Gashora Girls Academy in the Bugesera district in eastern Rwanda. He attended the first Rwandan IWitness teacher training at Kigali Genocide Memorial Center (KGMC) in November 2013 and, with his colleague Penelope Aryatugumya, will conduct a pilot of his first IWitness lesson at his school this year.

Sara Greenberg was so moved by her grandparents’ stories of survival and resilience during the Holocaust that she made a film to honor their history and inspire others to act out against genocide.

Ellie Ferd has a pretty clear understanding of the Holocaust: “It’s not human,” the 12-year-old said. “It’s not something that should happen.”

One of the first researchers to examine USC Shoah Foundation’s new Rwandan Tutsi Genocide collection is Samantha Lakin, a former Fulbright scholar and master’s candidate at Tufts University.

Dozens of college students conduct research in the Visual History Archive for their thesis projects at the USC Shoah Foundation every year. One student, however, is writing her senior thesis on the Shoah Foundation itself.

Davis Wamonhi’s own students at Kagarama Secondary School in Kigali, Rwanda, inspired him to use IWitness in his classroom.Wamonhi’s history students were invited to attend an IWitness pilot at Gisozi Genocide Memorial, where they were introduced to learning history through video testimonies through USC Shoah Foundation’s interactive educational website.

After working as an undergraduate intern at USC Shoah Foundation, Gabby Sharaga is now using testimony in her own classes as a student teacher. Sharaga interned in external relations and education (where she helped develop the IWitness website) at USC Shoah Foundation after conducting a research project using testimony for Genocide and Terrorism, a political science course at USC.

Twenty years after her family fled the Rwandan genocide, Rose Twagiramariya has returned to Rwanda to work for USC Shoah Foundation.Twagiramariya was born in Rwanda and left with her family in July 1994 during the genocide, when she was six years old. The family lived in a refugee camp in the Congo, Senegal, and Maryland before settling in Louisville, Kent., in 1999.

Interviewing Holocaust survivors for the Shoah Foundation in the 1990s was a “second film school” for filmmaker Rafael Lewandowski, and an experience he still draws on today.

For the next two months, three staff members from Aegis Trust in Rwanda are getting in-depth training in indexing genocide survivor testimony right here at the USC Shoah Foundation.

Intern Fiona Guo was able to utilize her Chinese heritage and interest in intercultural communication while working on the new Nanjing Massacre testimony collection at USC Shoah Foundation.

While protests rage in Ukraine, many Ukrainian teachers are committed to introducing new human rights educational materials to their classrooms. Olha Pedan Slyepukhina has taught middle- and high school history and social studies for 32 years in Ukraine. She was first introduced to the Shoah Foundation in 2007, participating in a teaching seminar called “Encountering Memory” about the film Spell Your Name, which was produced by the Shoah Foundation.

High school vice principal Tetyana Kozhevnikova is eager to share with teachers and students all over Ukraine what she learned at the November 2013 teacher training workshop in Kyiv on the use of a new multimedia teacher’s guide titled Where do Human Rights Begin: History and Contemporary Approaches.

He just graduated from high school last year, but Manuel Müller has already begun his first full-time job as USC Shoah Foundation’s 2014 Austrian Holocaust Memorial Service intern.

Sarah Miller gave testimony to the USC Shoah Foundation in 1997 about her family’s experiences hiding in France and Switzerland during the Holocaust – but she wasn’t finished telling her story just yet.

Peter Berczi began working as a librarian at Budapest's Central European University in 2009 –the same year that CEU became a Visual History Archive Access site. But more and more, he says, he thinks this coincidence was meant to be. Berczi helps professors at CEU find testimonies to use in their courses and conducts sessions to teach their students how to use the archive. He also conducts Visual History Archive trainings for local secondary educators as part of the Teaching with Testimony in the 21st Century professional development program.

Filmmaker Sam Kadi says he’ll be looking for honest, impactful storytelling when he helps judge the entries for this year’s Student Voices Short Film Contest. Kadi – an “engineer by trade, filmmaker by choice,” he says – came to the United States from Syria in his ‘20s and began making short films and documentaries after a stint as a theatrical actor, writer, and director. He graduated from the Motion Picture Institute of Michigan in 2007 and wrote and directed several narrative and documentary films including the award-winning short film Raised Alone in 2009.

Twelve years after being part of the team that designed the interface of the Visual History Archive, Ella Belzberg has made a detailed examination of the process her dissertation at the UC Santa Barbara Gevirtz Graduate School of Education.

Martin Šmok was making a documentary film in the summer of 1994 about the Jewish underground movement in Slovakia during World War II when he realized that the key witnesses he needed to interview all lived far away from his home in the Czech Republic. While looking for help, he came across the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, then just beginning its quest to interview 50,000 Holocaust survivors and witnesses around the world. Šmok was hired as an interviewer.

Monika Koszyńska says she feels privileged to be USC Shoah Foundation’s international liaison in Poland, but is also acutely aware of the magnitude of work to be done.Koszyńska joined the USC Shoah Foundation staff as its international liaison in Poland in 2002, though she had been familiar with Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation since the mid-1990s, when she was a teacher at a primary school.

Rwandan filmmaker Eric Kabera will travel from Hillywood (Rwanda’s burgeoning film industry named after the country’s famously hilly landscape) to Hollywood to help judge this year’s Student Voices Short Film Contest.

The stories of musicians during the Holocaust guided Syuzanna Petrosyan and Greg Irwin through the Student Voices Short Film Contest, and the result is their winning film Play for Your Life.Petrosyan, a master’s candidate in public diplomacy, and Irwin, a senior international relations major, are both interns at the USC Shoah Foundation and members of its student organization, SFISA.

Shirin Raban was just beginning work on her thesis, a short film about Persians’ observations of Passover in Los Angeles, when she decided to take on the Student Voices Short Film Contest.Raban is a master’s candidate in visual anthropology at USC with a background in graphic design. Another contestant in the Student Voices contest, Syuzanna Petrosyan, told Raban and her anthropological media seminar classmates about Student Voices and showed them some of her own work-in-progress.