Hela Goldstein’s testimony given to the British Film and Photographic Unit on April 24, 1945 is believed to be the first-ever audio-visual testimony given by a Holocaust survivor. As a 22-year old victim, she spoke from Bergen-Belsen, the Nazi concentration camp where she was imprisoned upon liberation. Standing at the foot of a mass grave with her killers before her, Hela recounted what she experienced. By telling her story in the face of death, she became a foremother of testimony.

Honoring the 70th anniversary of the Babi Yar tragedy, the Ukrainian Cinema Club in Berlin presented a screening of Spell Your Name, a documentary film by Sergey Bukovsky, co-produced by the USC Shoah Foundation Institute and the Victor Pinchuk Foundation. The screening was followed by a discussion with Cristoph Filinger, a journalist and a freelancer at the American Jewish Committee office in Berlin. Leonid Zozovskii, an Institute-interviewed survivor who lived through the Holocaust under false identity in Zelenchukskaia (Ordzhonikidze, Russia, then USSR), attended the screening.

USC Shoah Foundation has added 132 testimonies to its Visual History Archive. These firsthand accounts of mass atrocities spanning more than 100 years are now available to researchers, educators, family members, and the public.

Join author Judy Batalion, in conversation with Nancy Spielberg, to learn more about Batalion's new book The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos.

USC Professor Researching Forms of Jewish Defiance

The Academy Award®-winning feature documentary film shares the remarkable stories of five people ­– a grandmother, a teacher, a businessman, an artist, and a U.S. congressman – as they return from the United States to their hometowns and to the ghettos and concentration camps that once imprisoned them.

The film is currently available on Netflix and Blu-ray.