In the summer of 2012, after a four-year, multimillion-dollar effort to preserve digitally the video interviews in its Visual History Archive, the USC Shoah Foundation discovered that 4,755 testimonies had technical or mechanical issues, such as video dropout or flickering, or audio problems.

In honor of Memorial Day, we gratefully honor Arthur Langhorst, an American surgical technician and decorated World War II veteran, and the 361 other liberators from 19 countries who have given testimony to the Visual History Archive. Arthur recounts in this clip a tragic encounter with a young soldier who was brought to his operating table after sustaining injuries in the Battle of the Bulge.

USC Shoah Foundation is committed to expanding its archive to include testimony from survivors and witnesses of other genocides and crimes against humanity, and to make such testimony available for educational use around the world, alongside more than 57,466 testimonies of Holocaust survivors and other witnesses.To that end, USC Shoah Foundation works with partners around the world, sharing the expertise the Institute acquired through the collection, indexing, preservation, and dissemination of the testimonies that are currently in the Visual History Archive.

As a featured speaker at the 2014 Ambassadors for Humanity gala in Los Angeles, Michelle Sadrena Clark said that the USC Shoah Foundation had changed her life and her teaching. “We learned about that last year” is something a teacher never wants to hear her students say, but those are exactly the words Michelle Sadrena Clark heard from her students. What concerned her most was that they were talking about the Holocaust, as if it were just another history topic to cover once and then check off the list.

USC Shoah Foundation - The Institute for Visual History and Education is pleased to announce its Fellows for 2013/2014 academic year.

Offering a sweeping epic encompassing the years 1911–1945, this adaptation of the best-selling novel by Annejet van der Zijl tells the real-life love story of a mixed-race couple and their struggle to survive and help others in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands. Free spirit Rika, with four children, leaves her unfaithful husband and in order to survive, she rents out a spare room to the university student Waldemar, a bright young man from Surinam who is suffering deeply in racist Holland. Against all odds, Rika and Waldemar fall in love.

As the week of Memorial Day comes to a close we honor the soldiers who helped liberate Holocaust survivors from concentration camps. Lina Jackson, who was among the Sinti and Roma populations targeted for discrimination as part of the Nuremberg Laws, recounts her liberation from Dachau concentration camp by the American Armed Forces. She vividly remembers the kindness of one particular soldier.

Tenth grade students at Windward School in Mar Vista, California have been piloting a new IWitness activity titled What Can One Voice Tell Us About a Genocide as part of their Global Studies class.

In 1941, the Nazi regime, ordered the Jews in Germany to wear a Yellow Star of David inscribed with the word Jude (Jew). The following year, in June 1942, Jews in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Slovakia, and other lands under German control were ordered to begin wearing Yellow Stars.  Betty Gerard shows the Yellow Star with the word Jood (Jew in Dutch) she was forced to wear as a child in the Westerbork Concentration Camp in the Netherlands.

Dr. Bertram Schaffner, who served in the U.S Army during World War II as a psychiatrist evaluating the mental fitness of draftees, speaks about the discriminatory laws and regulations against homosexuals in the U.S. Army and his efforts to protect their privacy.

On June 5, 1942, the Nazis reported having killed 97,000 Jews in specially constructed gas vans. Friedrich August Jeckeln — who served as an SS and police leader in the occupied Soviet Union during World War II — testified in 1945 that Reich Leader Heinrich Himmler, who organized the mass murder of Jews, told him shootings were too impractical, so gas vans were devised as a more efficient system. The method was initially used against the mentally insane in Polish hospitals in 1939. By 1942 the Nazis had begun to deploy more than 36 of these specially designed and equipped vans.

USC Shoah Foundation has granted the Istituto Centrale per i beni sonori ed audiovisivi headquarters in Rome full remote access to its Visual History Archive.

Born in Coburg, Germany, on Nov 17, 1923, Harry Nomburg fled from Germany to the United Kingdom and fought with the British armed forces. He was attached as an interpreter to Commando Force. In this clip, Harry recalls landing on Normandy on D-Day, June 6.

Refreshments will be served.

Branko Lustig, who served as one of the producers on Schindler’s List reflects upon his experience when he returned to Auschwitz during the making of the 1980s television mini-series “War and Remembrance.”

Holocaust survivors from the Bay Area of California who have shared their experiences on video, and in numerous in-person appearances, were recognized for their contributions at a ceremony in San Francisco on June 9, 2013.

Cinemark will hold special screenings of Schindler’s List, with all proceeds benefiting the USC Shoah Foundation—the Institute for Visual History and Education that the film inspired. Participating Cinemark theatres will screen Schindler’s List on Sunday, June 23 at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m., and on Wednesday, June 26, at 2 p.m. and 7:00 p.m.

Anna Heilman remembers fleeing from a burning building and making her way to the Aryan side during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943. Anna relates she was rounded up by the SS on May 3, 1943, was transported back and taken directly to the “Umschlagplatz” in the ghetto. She describes the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto. Anna, along with her sister and parents, was deported to the Majdanek concentration camp that May.

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Kori Street, PhD, director of education for USC Shoah Foundation, will deliver a presentation about its IWitness Program at the University of Miami’s 12th annual Holocaust Teacher Summer Institute on June 13, 2013. Street’s talk, “Learning to Use Holocaust Survivor Testimony in the Classroom,” will address the program’s value in teaching eyewitness history, as well as its ability to help build digital literacy. The Holocaust Teacher Institute is sponsored by the University of Miami School of Education & Human Development and the Miami Dade County Public Schools.

When Holocaust survivor Eva Schloss was 23 years old her mother Fritzi married Otto Frank, making her the posthumous stepsister to Anne Frank, who had died eight years earlier in a concentration camp. Like Anne, Eva went into hiding in Holland, and was betrayed, captured, and sent to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. Years later Eva’s daughter, Caroline Anne Schloss, was named for Anne, and reminded Otto of his late daughter. Although they were not close friends, Eva remembers meeting Anne and playing with her as a child.

USC Shoah Foundation is partnering with the American Sephardi Federation and other organizations to undertake the Sephardi and Mizrahi Jewish Testimony Collection, a new initiative to document the Sephardi and Mizrahi experience during World War II and the Holocaust.

Survivor Gad Ben-Meir recalls the Baghdad Pogrom of June 1-2, 1941, during the Jewish holiday of Shavuot, and what he saw looking out his window as a 9-year-old boy.

Born in Tunisia in 1940, Jacqueline Gmach left at the age of 18. Though her family was not directly in danger, the Nazi genocide remains deeply personal to her. She has devoted her career to educating people about its horrors as well as promoting the Jewish culture its executioners tried to obliterate. A scholar with degrees and credentials from institutions ranging from the Sorbonne in Paris to the University of Jerusalem and the University of Montreal, Gmach serves as project director for USC Shoah Foundation’s Testimonies of North Africa and the Middle East project.

Sarah Ditman remembers witnessing the occupation of Paris, her city of birth, when the German armed forces invaded France on June 14, 1940. She recalls with sadness that as a young woman, she watched out her window as German soldiers were marching down the Champs-Elysées.

The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) held its semiannual Plenary meetings in Berlin, Germany from 11-14 June 2013 under the Canadian Chairmanship. 

Marie speaks of her fondness for her father. She especially remembers not wanting to share his affection with her baby brother. “ I wanted to be the only one.” However, Marie notes that life for her family changed in 1939.