French educators are attending a Teaching with Testimony in the 21st Century workshop today and tomorrow to learn about IWitness and using testimony in the classroom.

Jan Karskiwas recognized as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem for risking his life in order to alert the world about the Holocaust. He remembers meeting award-winning French documentarian Claude Lanzmann, who interviewed Karski for his film Shoah, a nine and a half-hour documentary about the Holocaust.

Growing up, it wasn’t terribly unusual to see people in our house with telltale tattoos on their arms. We kids somehow knew what those blurry inked numbers meant, but we also knew it wasn’t polite to ask about them. And so, I never did. And honestly, no one in my family had been so marked — the people with tattoos were mostly friends of my grandparents — so it wasn’t something I had a lot of interest in hearing about. And perhaps in an effort to protect our innocence, family elders showed no interest in talking about it.

Alice Craig recalls her family’s deportation to Auschwitz. She remembers how her father prepared for the deportation by burying important family documents and how he knew that they wouldn’t be returning.

USC Shoah Foundation associate director of research Dan Leshem and former Institute Fellow Jeffrey Shandler will lead a seminar about video interviews of Holocaust survivors at the Association for Jewish Scholars (AJS) conference next week.

The testimonies in USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive are used all over the world to teach about history, tolerance and human rights. But now, Glenn Fox is using testimony of Holocaust survivors to learn about something else: gratitude.

Josef Feingold describes in Spanish, his decision for not boarding the ship “Struma” on December 12 1941, set to sail from Constanta, Romania, en route to British Mandate Palestine, for fear the ship was unsafe and too overcrowded for the journey. He relates that, with almost 800 refugees on board, the Struma reached Istanbul, Turkey but it was not allowed to land. Instead, it was anchored offshore thus forcing the passengers to stay on board for several weeks. The Struma was finally set adrift, but was torpedoed and it sank off the coast of Sile, Turkey, on February 24, 1942.

French film director Claude Lanzmann spoke candidly about his latest film, The Last of the Unjust, at a USC School of Cinematic Arts screening hosted by USC Shoah Foundation Tuesday night.

“Time heals all wounds,” they say. It’s difficult to find any other element in our daily lives that possesses the sobering effect that time does. It tames emotions and calms nerves. It allows for much needed reflection and analysis. And, perhaps most importantly, it brings with it resolution and closure. By any account, a century would be more than enough time to heal even the deepest wound, but, surprisingly, time’s impact isn’t always as thorough as we’d expect it to be.

 Madame Xia discusses her family's experiences on December 13, 1937, when Japanese forces entered Nanjing, China.

January 18, 2012: Resistance during the Holocaust is still mostly seen in terms of organized or armed group activities, yet this perspective overlooks individual acts of opposition. Up to now, the availability of sources for analyzing the behavior of German Jews has been limited. Historians used reports originated by the Nazi state and/or written post-war testimonies. In those sources individual acts of opposition barely emerge. However, a closer analysis of the micro level of Nazi society challenges the common image of German Jews as passive victims.

南加州大学与侵华日军南京大屠杀纪念馆合作扩展影像历史档案加利福尼亚洛杉矶 2013年12月13日  南加州大学纳粹屠犹基金会与侵华日军南京大屠杀遇难同胞纪念馆展开历史性的合作，为1937年南京大屠杀最后的幸存者保留证言。新的证言旨在构建起完整的个人生活史，包括他们在南京大屠杀之前和之后的社会文化生活。1937年12月13日，侵华日军占领了当时中国的首都南京，在近两个月时间内杀害了平民与大量解除武装的中国士兵达30万人以上。这些证言将为南京大屠杀历史增添新的视角与知识，并将于2014年2月归入美国南加州大学纳粹屠犹基金会下属的影像历史档案库。采访的程序是根据纳粹屠犹基金会在采集纳粹大屠杀幸存者证言以及采集柬埔寨和卢旺达大屠杀幸存者证言时所积累的经验。新采集的证言也将加入侵华日军南京大屠杀遇难同胞纪念馆已有的档案中。侵华日军南京大屠杀遇难同胞纪念馆与南加州大学纳粹屠犹基金会的合作项目超越了一般层面上对于南京大屠杀见证人的经历梳理、档案整理或是宣传报道，而是试图通过客观和规范的研究，深入到南京大屠杀见证人的生活状况、心理状态、历史意义和现实价值等层面，驳斥日本右翼势力对历史的歪曲和否定，引发学界、政界、商界和社会公众对该群体的关注，揭示创伤性记忆、悲剧文化、历史废墟对于文明进步的意义。

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.

September 27, 2012: Cambodian genocide survivor Kosal Path, a lecturer in the USC School of International Relations and a USC Shoah Foundation Fellow, discussed his research on social rehabilitation in post-genocide Cambodia.

USC Shoah Foundation and Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall have embarked on a historic effort to preserve the testimonies of the last survivors of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, also known as the Rape of Nanjing.

Summary: Free and open to the public, monthly Institute visits give guests a chance to explore the life stories of survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust and other genocides and to discover how their memories are being used to overcome prejudice, intolerance, and bigotry. Description:

Summary: Free and open to the public, monthly Institute visits give guests a chance to explore the life stories of survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust and other genocides and to discover how their memories are being used to overcome prejudice, intolerance, and bigotry. Description:

 This event has been cancelled. Please contact lrogers@usc.edu or kiahays@usc.edu with any questions.  

As I write this, I am standing alongside 30 of the last 200 survivors of the Nanjing Massacre, which began 76 years ago Friday. Sirens sound around this Chinese city as the last few eyewitnesses of a massacre gather. Starting Dec. 13, 1937, and lasting six weeks, as many as 300,000 civilians were murdered during the atrocities.

USC Doheny Memorial Library (DML), Room 240 How Many Bytes does it Take to Get to the Center? Finding the Human in Digital Humanities

USC School of Cinematic Arts (SCA) Room 106 Awards for the Institute’s annual Student Voices Film Contest will be announced. The evening will include screenings of the winning films as well as a panel discussion with honorees and the distinguished jury.   Independent filmmakers Eric Kabera and Sam Kadi will serve on the Student Voices Film Contest jury for the first time.

In this clip, Madame Chen describes the killing of her family members, and explains how she managed to escape from a Japanese soldier.

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?

Damaged videotapes in the Visual History Archive, previously thought to be unfixable, are being restored thanks to new software developed by USC Shoah Foundation technology staff.

Leon Gersten and some of his family escaped the Frystak ghetto in Poland and hid with a Polish family for almost two years. Leon remembers when police officials entered the home of the Polish family looking for Jews and he recalls how much the family sacrificed.