Students learn about the plight of the refugees who attempted to flee Nazi Germany on the M.S. St. Louis and reflect on the world’s response to the voyage and its implications for today in Voyage of the St. Louis: From Hope to Despair.

Four of the conference’s educators will discuss how human rights and violence can be taught using digital technology and other innovative methods at the “Digital Pedagogy, Education, Human Rights and Violence Studies” roundtable, moderated by USC Shoah Foundation’s director of education, Kori Street.

USC Shoah Foundation chief technology officer Sam Gustman will return to his alma mater, the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, to give a presentation about the Visual History Archive and the USC Digital Repository on Thursday.

Dario Gabbai speaks about his participation within the Sonderkommando Uprising in Auschwitz II-Birkenau on October 7, 1944. Dario explains how his group failed at their attempt to burn down Crematorium II. Other members of the Sondekommando set fire to Crematorium IV. The SS put down the revolt in the end, executed its participants, and blew up what remained of the crematorium

Jared McBride, the fellowship’s debut recipient, was selected by a panel of USC researchers and professors for the originality of his proposal and its potential to advance genocide research.

One hundred survivors from nations around the world to participate in official observance on January 27, 2015

Marianna Bergida grew up with little knowledge of most of her family – her mother, sister, cousins, grandparents, aunts and uncles were killed in Auschwitz when she was very young, and her father couldn’t speak about his own experiences during the Holocaust. Determined to not let other descendants of survivors lose their family history as she had, Bergida became an interviewer for the Shoah Foundation and ended up interviewing one of the real-life inspirations of Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List.

Jared McBride, the fellowship’s debut recipient, was chosen by a panel of USC researchers and professors for the originality of his proposal and its potential to advance genocide research.

Mieczyslaw (Mietek) Pemper typed up the actual Schindler’s list and was saved by Oskar Schindler. Pemper speaks (in German) about Schindler and how he bribed and used personal connections to save hundreds of Jews. Pemper also describes how he came to work with Schindler and help in the creation of the list. 

USC Shoah Foundation’s Nanjing Massacre testimony collection more than doubled in size last week when USC Shoah Foundation and Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall conducted 18 new interviews with Nanjing Massacre survivors.

Laura Pritchard Dobrin was inspired to create the first-ever teacher-authored activity in IWitness by one of her own favorite educators – and in the process, produced a lesson that teaches students about not just the Holocaust, but also a fascinating poet named Lotte Kramer.

In the first-ever teacher-authored IWitness activity, Writing in Exile, students close-read poetry as they learn about one woman’s experience during the Holocaust.

I recently returned to China to record audio-visual testimonies from survivors of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre. In February 2014, the Institute incorporated 12 Nanjing testimonies into its Visual History Archive, adding a new perspective to the 53,000 testimonies that we collected from the Holocaust and the Rwandan Tutsi Genocide.

Lotte Kramer reads a sonnet she wrote about her family's gentile friends Nazi controlled Germany.

Teachers from across the Netherlands participated in an IWitness training session Oct. 4, held as part of a new partnership between USC Shoah Foundation and the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

Harriet H. Forster describes life in Austria just following the Anschluss in 1938 including saving her brother from deportation. Harriet later moved to the United States and became a professor at USC and was internationally known for her work in physics and astronomy. She died on September 28, 2014, she was 97 years old.

Sandra Aguilar oversees metadata, indexing, and institutional archiving. Prior to the Institute, Sandra worked as Director of Archives for USC School of Cinematic Arts' Warner Bros. and Moving Image Archives. Previously she worked as Media Librarian in the visual effects industry at Industrial Light & Magic. She received an M.L.I.S. from the UCLA and a B.A. in Film Studies from UC Santa Barbara.

After years of working with the USC Shoah Foundation and running the Los Angeles Jewish Film Festival, Hilary Helstein admits she still couldn’t make sense of the Holocaust. But through art, she found her way in – and so have audiences around the world who have watched her film As Seen Through These Eyes.

Aniko Friedberg describes how she would create sculptures out of clay while interned in the Allendorf forced labor camp, a subcamp of Buchenwald. She didn’t recall this memory until she reunited with former prisoners, who remembered her sculptures, decades later.

USC Shoah Foundation’s academic year programming kicks off next Monday with a screening of the documentary As Seen Through These Eyes, which tells the stories of Holocaust survivors who made art during and after World War II.

With nearly 52,000 interviews from survivors of the Holocaust and other genocides, the archive of audio-visual testimony assembled and maintained by USC Shoah Foundation is so abundant it would take at least 12 years to watch it from beginning to end. And that’s assuming the footage would be rolling 24 hours a day, seven days a week. When I started my new job here at the Institute, I was struck by this statistic, which adequately conveys the scope of this incredible resource.

For the first time, USC Shoah Foundation has published a lesson that was created by a teacher in the Teaching with Testimony in the 21st Century professional development program.

USC Shoah Foundation’s educational resources can help educators observe National Bullying Prevention Month in October by teaching students about acceptance, resilience and other relevant topics.

William recalls the joyful celebration of Simchat Torah-the holiday marking the completion of weekly Torah readings- with Rabbi Teitelbaum, the Satmar Rebbe, holding a Sefer Torah (Torah scroll) - in the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp. The celebration took place even though the barrack was surrounded by German soldiers.

Please join USC Shoah Foundation as it co-hosts a lecture with the USC Gould School of Law International Human Rights Clinic.Professor David Crane, former Chief Prosecuter at the Special Court for Sierra Leone, will discuss the effort he has led to seek justice for the hundredsof thousands killed and millions displaced since 2011 in Syria’s ongoing civil war. Crane will detail his tireless advocacy before the UN Security Council, General Assembly, and the US Congress in hopes of establishing a Syrian Extraordinary Tribunal to Prosecute Atrocity Crimes.

Judy LaPietra was one of the first to learn about USC Shoah Foundation’s new educational website, IWitness, and from then on she has remained one of its most avid users.LaPietra teaches eighth grade history at St. Mark Catholic School in Huntersville, NC, and also created and teaches three courses in the global studies department at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte: “The Legacy of the Holocaust,” “Bearing Witness to the Past:  A Journey to Auschwitz” and “Representations of the Holocaust.” She has even taken her college students on trips to Poland to visit Auschwitz.