Out of the dozens of films, concerts and other projects he’s worked on throughout his career, Steve Purcell says the USC Shoah Foundation-produced educational film One Day in Auschwitz is the most meaningful of them all.

It’s easy to see why Vartkes Yeghiayan thinks of Martin Marootian et al. v. New York Life Insurance Company as “his baby.”

Out of all the Armenian families in the small California town where Richard Hovannisian grew up, Hovannisian grew up in an English-speaking household and didn’t know much about his heritage or Armenian history. Today, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Hovannisian is one of the leading experts on the Armenian Genocide who founded the Armenian Studies program at UCLA and is an adjunct professor at USC, where, for several years, he has advised USC Shoah Foundation on its Armenian Genocide testimony collection.

Scott Spencer was flying from Philadelphia to Los Angeles last May to meet up with his wife, who had just gotten a new job as the cantor of University Synagogue in Brentwood, when he struck up a conversation with the young girl sitting next to him.He asked her why she was traveling to Los Angeles. To his surprise, she said she was going to meet President Obama and present a documentary she had made for school.

After a career spent producing live events for television, working on Auschwitz: The Past is Present allowed Leslie Wilson to return to her early passion for history in what she calls a life-changing experience.

In order to commemorate the genocides of the 20th century, Tigranna Zakaryan wants to start where many survivors ended up: Los Angeles.

Watch Shony Braun’s full testimony from the Visual History Archive as part of Comcast’s Days of Remembrance: PastFORWARD broadcast April 15-June 1, 2015.In the forests of Romania in 1934, four-year-old Shony Braun was out for a walk with his babysitter when he wandered off and became lost. A gypsy woman, hearing his cries and not knowing who he was or where he belonged, took him to the gypsy camp for safety. Upon their arrival, Shony’s attention was utterly transfixed by something: a violin. It was the most beautiful sound he had ever heard.

Julie Picard’s students in Sens, France, may have a future in journalism.

Caroline Friend’s journey to becoming the winner of the Student Voices Short Film Contest first began two years ago – when she entered the contest and lost.That didn’t deter her from entering again this year, and her dedication paid off. The jury awarded her film Helen Lewis: A Survivor’s Story first place for the 2015 competition, putting Friend well on her way to her goal of becoming a historical filmmaker.

Professor Roy Schwartzman is proof that you don’t need to be a historian to make full use of the Visual History Archive in teaching and research.

Watch Henry Rosmarin’s full testimony from the Visual History Archive as part of Comcast’s Days of Remembrance: PastFORWARD broadcast April 15-June 1, 2015. The sound of a harmonica usually brings to mind playfulness, joy, a sense of merriment. For Henry Rosmarin, it is also conjures the darkest chapter of his life, when his talent for music earned him favor with a Nazi commandant and kept him alive in a German concentration camp.

Growing up, Addison Sandoval worked in his dad’s diesel repair shop in Compton, Calif., driving and delivering parts during the summers. It was there, encountering different people and places, that he learned to appreciate the values of humility, treating people with respect, and embracing people’s differences, he says.

When you use indexing terms to search through USC Shoah Foundation’s first 60 Armenian Genocide interviews in the Visual History Archive, or rely on the subtitles to understand the Armenian-language interviews, think of Hrag Yedalian.

Michael Amerian is in Yerevan, Armenia, this week with staff of USC Shoah Foundation to commemorate the 100th anniversary the greatest tragedy in the country’s history.

Most students give their teachers gifts of coffee mugs, chocolate, or flowers. This year, Eden Strunk’s students pooled their resources and found her a Cambodian genocide survivor to speak to the class.Strunk had inspired them to care about human rights and genocide just as she inspired Ruth Hernandez, a ninth grader at Esperanza Charter Academy in Philadelphia who won USC Shoah Foundation’s first-ever IWitness Video Challenge last year. Strunk had assigned the challenge to her “advisory” class – a course devoted to getting students more engaged in their school and community.

One night last week, Megan Maybray was panicking.A Holocaust survivor named Rita Ross was visiting her school, Kennett Middle School near Philadelphia, the next day, but Maybray was having trouble teaching her ESL students about the Holocaust. Her students are new arrivals to the United States and most know little English. Maybray had never really taught the Holocaust before and could tell that her previous attempt to introduce them to the basics had not had much of an impact.

Watch Alice Herz Sommer’s full testimony from the Visual History Archive as part of Comcast’s Days of Remembrance: PastFORWARD broadcast April 15-June 1, 2015.Perhaps no musical Holocaust survivor is more well-known and beloved than Alice Herz Sommer.

(Pickhan, left, and Bothe)USC Shoah Foundation has chosen its 2015 Teaching Fellows: Gertrud Pickhan and Alina Bothe, who will develop a seminar course as well as a public exhibition on the deportation of Polish Jews from Berlin at Freie Universität.Teaching Fellows receive a $2,000 stipend and $500 for course materials, and work with USC Shoah Foundation staff to develop their course. Their syllabi are published on the USC Shoah Foundation website, and fellows are expected to give a public presentation of their course at the end of the fellowship period.

Elizabeth Vitanza teaches her students a multitude of skills, including French, video editing and project management, when she does her IWitness unit each year.

(Alex Biniaz-Harris, left, and Ambrose Soehn)The composers behind the three-movement piano piece featured in the documentary Melodies of Auschwitz, now playing on Comcast Xfinity’s Days of Remembrance: PastFORWARD broadcast, reunited for a screening and concert at USC’s Brain and Creativity Institute this week and spoke candidly about their journey from page to performance.

The second annual Greenberg Research Fellowship has been awarded to Julia Werner, a PhD candidate in history at Humboldt University, Berlin, who will combine testimony with her study of photography of occupied Poland during World War II.

Many survivors of Auschwitz talk about hearing music when they first arrived at the camp or while they were marching to work each morning. One of the musicians they heard may very well have been Anita Lasker Wallfisch.

Sally Ingram was first introduced to USC Shoah Foundation years ago, when her mother-in-law, Marione Ingram, gave her testimony to the Visual History Archive about her life in hiding during the war. Now, Ingram is using testimony and the IWitness Video Challenge to inspire her middle school students to deeply engage with survivors’ stories.

Toni Nickel is preparing for a career of teaching the Holocaust by serving as the first-ever USC Shoah Foundation intern at Texas A&M University. The A.I. and Manet Schepps Foundation funded a three-year, $75,000 initiative to support a teaching fellow and intern at Texas A&M. The fellowship will instruct professors on ways to integrate the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive of Holocaust and other genocide survivors’ testimonies into their teaching.

Watch Judith Goldstein’s full testimony from the Visual History Archive as part of Comcast’s Days of Remembrance: PastFORWARD broadcast April 15-June 1, 2015. From her childhood in Vilna, Poland, to her adult life in the United States, the arts have rarely been very far from Judith Goldstein.

When reading a published article or book, it can be easy to forget how many hundreds of hours of research the author put in in order to bring the project to fruition. Many scholars do this research completely on their own, but some are lucky enough to have an assistant.

By Josh GrossbergUnwilling to acquiesce to the demands of a shameful ideology, a German Nazi rescues a group of Jews by putting them to work in a factory during World War II. He saves about 1,200 people, but by the end of the war, he despairs that he didn’t do enough. He returns to civilian life in anonymity, but is later recognized as a Righteous Among the Nations by the State of Israel.

USC Shoah Foundation’s first-ever Texas A&M teaching fellow Adam R. Seipp is drawing on the Visual History Archive to help him fill some pretty big shoes.Seipp, a professor of history, will be taking over Texas A&M’s Introduction to the Holocaust course following the retirement of beloved Professor Arnold Krammer. The course is one of the most popular at the school, so teaching it is an incredible responsibility, Seipp said – but, he’ll do it with the support of the A.I. and Manet Schepps Foundation Teaching Fellow program.

Twenty years ago, memories of the Holocaust were too painful for Liliane Weissberg’s parents to give their testimonies to USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive. But Weissberg herself has taken on the mantle of studying and remembering the Holocaust as a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and USC Shoah Foundation’s next Rutman Teaching Fellow.

Former indexer Alessandro Marazzi Sassoon may have left his job at the USC Shoah Foundation last year, but what he learned working with the Institute has had a lasting impact.