Since October, once a month, every month, a group of grade school students have met either virtually or physically at the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education’s home at USC’s Leavey Library. These students are USC Shoah Foundation’s newest crop of Junior Interns, there to study what attitudes breed hatred and intolerance, how they can spread positive moral authority and be an active participant in civil society using the weight of testimony from the Visual History Archive.

Within an hour of learning about IWitness for the first time, Julie McDaniel could already envision how its testimonies and activities could enhance her work as Student Safety and Well-Being Consultant at the Oakland Schools district in Michigan.

They started in October – making the trip to USC Shoah Foundation’s home at USC’s Leavey Library once a month, every month to meet, either virtually or physically, and study what attitudes breed hatred and intolerance, how they can spread positive moral authority and how to use the weight of testimony from the Visual History Archive to become active participants in civil society.

Born in Bolivia, educated in Germany and now residing in Los Angeles, Sandra Gruner-Domic brings her expertise in Latin American migration and social anthropology to her role as one of the guiding forces of USC Shoah Foundation’s Guatemalan Genocide testimony collection.

For the past couple years, high school English teacher Matthew Otis has incorporated IWitness into his unit on the Holocaust and intolerance. Now, IWitness’s 100 Days to Inspire Respect program has inspired him to share his students’ process of cross-cultural understanding with a larger audience. Otis, who teaches at Everett Area High School in Pennsylvania, first learned about IWitness and Echoes and Reflections at a teaching conference last year and since then has used testimony as a resource in his unit on the Holocaust.

For Lucy Fried, storytelling is the best way to make an impact. The high school sophomore is a Junior Intern with USC Shoah Foundation, and as such, has spent one day every month for the past five months listening to testimony from the Institute’s Visual History Archive – to the stories and memories of Holocaust and genocide survivors.

Robert Ackles has slogged up the 405 from San Diego to Los Angeles once a month, every month, for almost two years. He’s sat through the heat and the desperate freeway traffic for one reason, and one reason alone: to visit USC Shoah Foundation’s home at USC’s Leavey Library as a Junior Intern. Part of a small group of young students, Ackles meets periodically to discuss and analyze such topics as hatred, prejudice, intolerance and how to stop both using positive moral guidance and active participation in society.

As a little kid, Toni Nickel never could settle between Sesame Street and the History Channel, her interest in other people’s stories of war piqued such that learning the colors and the order of the numbers became forever secondary. Her curiosity – specifically in the Holocaust – came to a head in college when she took a History of the Holocaust course that used the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive. There, in a classroom at Texas A&M University, Nickel knew her fate and future were sealed.

“Hate starts with fear of others.” “Be informed. Don’t judge. Learn love.” “Remove appearance. We’re all the same.” Ninth graders in Sara Mehltretter’s world cultures and geography class at Tampa Catholic High School in Tampa, Fla., wrote these six-word stories and many others, and shared them with not only each other but also their whole school.

When students learn about refugees in IWitness, it will be Tomás Rafa’s documentary video footage of the current-day refugee crisis in Europe that will help them make connections between refugees of the past and present.

Since October, Evy Stumpff has been an unconventional Junior Intern with USC Shoah Foundation. While the rest of the young interns have spent the past several months analyzing, together, what attitudes breed hatred and intolerance and how they can spread positive moral authority and become active participants in civil society – learning from USC Shoah Foundation’s IWitness activities and the Visual History Archive – Stumpff has had to leap over one major obstacle to do the same work.

For the past semester and a half, Nic Chavez has spent one day out of every month at USC Shoah Foundation’s home at USC’s Leavey Library, discussing with his fellow Junior Interns at the Institute what attitudes breed hatred and intolerance, and how derivatives can be quelled.

Now several months into her USC Shoah Foundation Junior Internship, Mackenzie Westman, junior at Eagle Rock High School Highly Gifted Magnet, has come to understand how you can counter all of the elements that can fuel hate. The monthly meetings at the Institute, and concurrent viewings of testimony from USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive, have been paramount in shaping her perception.

Marisa Fox-Bevilacqua grew up never knowing that her mother was a Holocaust survivor. That is, until a series of discoveries after her mother’s death led her to the truth: her mother had survived Gabersdorf, a slave labor camp for Jewish girls and young women, for four and a half years – and had never said a word about it.

A little more than 70 years ago, two-year-old Mickey Shapiro arrived with his parents, Holocaust survivors Sara and Asa Shapiro, in the United States from a Displaced Persons camp in Germany. When they came to America, Mickey estimates that they had about $8 in their pocket. Sara and Asa built a life and family here in America where they worked with dedication to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive. Mickey honors his parents and carries on that legacy through his work with USC Shoah Foundation.

When a long-awaited maternity leave struck USC Shoah Foundation’s communications department, Holly Blackwelder was there to carry the social-media-manager torch, stepping into the position three weeks ago and embracing it with ease. A temporary successor to Deanna Hendrick, Blackwelder will continue to work as social media manager through the summer.

USC Shoah Foundation is saddened to learn of the passing of Holocaust survivor Curt Lowens, a wartime hero who became a well-known character actor when he moved to the United States. He was 91. Born Curt Lowenstein on Nov. 17, 1925 in Germany, Lowen and his family had planned to emigrate to the United States as World War II was starting, but they were stopped from leaving the Netherlands when the Germans invaded that country. He was briefly deported to the Westerbork concentration camp in 1943, but he was released because of his father’s business connections.

Political scientist Yael Siman used to think she couldn’t be part of the Holocaust studies field because she’s not a historian. But after discovering USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive, she has embarked on her own research project and has even begun collaborating with the Institute’s education department on new lessons for university students.

Social studies teacher Linda O’Dwyer’s first experience with IWitness showed her how creative her students could be while learning how to counter hate.

For the past two months, the USC Shoah Foundation communications department has had a temporary new member: Leonie Schueler-Springorum, a recent high school graduate from Germany who has been an enthusiastic assistant on a variety of communications tasks.

For more than two decades, George Weiss made his way to USC Shoah Foundation almost every week, to add yet another layer to the story he is helping preserve. Sentence by sentence, memory by memory, Weiss wants to ensure that history does not get lost.

Melanie Dadourian is an active member of the Next Generation Council because she understands all too well the dangers of silence and denial. Her grandparents were Armenian Genocide survivors who escaped certain death in Turkey by fleeing to the United States and that history deeply affects her. “All genocides are horrible,” she says, “but ours is particularly difficult to educate people about because the Turkish government denies it to this day. It’s been written out of history.”

Stories have the power to educate, change people’s world view, and inspire empathy,” says David Zaslav, a member of USC Shoah Foundation’s Executive Committee and the president and CEO of Discovery Communications. “It’s a kind of understanding that can’t be replicated by history books.”

Peggy Walker’s students at McCall Middle School in Massachusetts have changed the way they do research based on their experience with IWitness. Walker first began using IWitness last year, after using educational resources she found on the USC Shoah Foundation website. She began exploring IWitness and said she “immediately” saw the potential it could have for her students.

After seeing his students’ remarkable achievements both inside and outside the classroom, Matt Silvia thought they could make a real difference by entering the IWitness Video Challenge. And he was right. Silvia’s students at Chicago’s Walter Payton College Preparatory Alana Chandler, Yu Jing Chen and Natalia Wang are the grand prize winners of the 2017 IWitness Video Challenge for their video “Who Are You? Embracing Identity in Our Community.”

IWitness Video Challenge winner Alana Chandler gravitated toward the subject of identity in her project because she has always grappled with her own. Growing up Jewish and Japanese (and attending a Jewish middle school and Japanese Saturday school), Alana said she often felt torn between the two sides of her identity. At the middle school, kids joked about her Japanese heritage, and at Saturday school, kids expressed confusion about her religion.

Yu Jing Chen, a rising senior at Walter Payton College Preparatory High School in Chicago, teamed up with two classmates to produce the grand prize-winning entry of the 2017 IWitness Video Challenge.

IWitness Video Challenge winner Natalia Wang was inspired by testimony in IWitness to share a message of acceptance with her whole school. Natalia and her teammates Alana Chandler and Yu Jing Chen won the 2017 contest with their video “Who Are You? Embracing Identity in Our Community.” The three are rising seniors at Walter Payton College Preparatory High School in Chicago, and were encouraged to enter the contest by their teacher Matt Silvia.

After discovering Professor Melissa Kravetz’s IWitness “digital essay” assignment on an internet forum for historians, Visiting Assistant Professor of History April Trask developed her own assignment for her students at Amherst College that many students say is one of the most meaningful they’ve done. Trask has long been interested in digital pedagogy and wanted to find digital resources for her history students at Amherst that offered more than just a digital presentation of traditional written materials, she said.

In one testimony in the Visual History Archive, a Rwandan Tutsi Genocide survivor recounts a disturbing story from his childhood: At his school, he and the other Tutsi students were put on lockdown in their dorms while the school administrators met with the Hutu students to tell them that their Tutsi classmates were plotting to kill them.