Dr. Vera Laska describes how, as a teenager, she began helping Jews and French political prisoners cross the mountains from Slovakia into Hungary.

Two of the three Center Summer 2017 research fellows gathered to publicly present and discuss their research using the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive (VHA).

Philippe Sands, Professor of Law and Director of the Centre on International Courts and Tribunals at University College London, gave a public lecture at the USC Gould School of Law focusing on his recent book "East West Street: On the Origins of 'Genocide' and 'Crimes Against Humanity'".

In honor of International Women's Day, USC Shoah Foundation is revisiting the story of the late Vera Laska, who joined the Czech resistance as a teenager and escorted dozens of Jews to safety in the snowy mountains of southern Slovakia.

The more than 1,000 interviews will constitute the largest non-Holocaust-related collection to be integrated into the Institute’s Visual History Archive. It will also be the Archive’s first audio-only collection.

Sarkis Miranian was born in 1908 or after in Yeghekis (present-day Göllü) in the current province of Bitlis, a village nestled in a valley on the southern shores of Lake Van. He describes the situation in his village right before the Genocide began in the Van region as well as the immediate impact it had on his family.  This audio clip is a part of the Richard G. Hovannisian Armenian Genocide Oral History Collection which is an audio only collection.

USC Shoah Foundation is saddened to learn about the passing of Kalman Aron, a Holocaust survivor who created in paint the horrors he witnessed during World War II. He died on Feb. 24. He was 93.

USC Shoah Foundation is deeply saddened by the passing of Hannah Kent, who survived three concentration camps and a death march, but went on to live a full life filled with love, family and resolve. She was 88. Born Hanka Szarkman on Oct. 9, 1929, in Lodz, Poland, Hannah Kent was the wife of Roman Kent, a Life Member of USC Shoah Foundation’s Board of Councilors and a leader in the Holocaust survivor movement. Hannah and Roman Kent met in New York after World War II and married in 1957. They had two children, Jeffrey and Susan.

Lucía Samayoa was born in Guatemala, and, after moving away at age 6, was schooled in various countries throughout Latin America. But it wasn’t really until last year, when she started working at Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation (FAFG) in Guatemala City, that the 30-year-old really gained a deeper understanding of the genocide that killed roughly 200,000 civilians – mainly indigenous Mayans – at the hands of the Guatemalan military in the early 1980s.

The release follows the recent completion of 489 interviews with the survivors of the Guatemala Genocide at the hands of the Guatemalan military in the early 1980s.

Sandra Patricia García Paredes, a survivor of the Guatemalan genocide, speaks about her attempt to escape from the soldiers who kidnapped her. A clip of her testimony appears in the IWitness activity, “The Mechanisms of Violence Used During the Armed Conflict.”

“My mother very rarely spoke about the Holocaust or about what happened to her or how she, my father, my brother and myself survived the Holocaust as a complete family,” said Eddy Boas, whose book "I Am Not A Victim -- I Am A Survivor" chronicles the story of his family. “But the inspiration for my story actually came from the interview my mother did with USC Shoah Foundation in March 1995 – she would only participate in the interview if I was allowed to sit next to her.”

It’s hard to imagine I’m even typing this sentence, but an avowed Holocaust denier on Tuesday became the official Republican nominee for an upcoming congressional election in Illinois. Arthur Jones won the primary despite the fact that he once led the American Nazi Party and has freely shared his antisemitic views. Perhaps even more disturbing is the fact that Arthur Jones received more than 20,000 votes, according to preliminary results.

Living through the Holocaust was such a strange and overwhelming experience, survivors often found it difficult to find ways to describe it. In her lecture “Phantom Geographies in Representations of the Holocaust” hosted by USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Studies on March 22, Kathryn Brackney identified survivors who talked about living in a world outside of time and place, where even the laws of nature fell apart.

During the trials, she worked as a research analyst. Her command of the English and German languages made her an invaluable resource to the prosecution.

In this clip from her testimony, Jane Lester talks about the relative gender equality that existed in her work environment during the Nuremberg Trials.

Nurusseher is a Rohingya refugee. An English transcript of Nurusseher's message is below:

Despite the testimony of many witnesses to his Nazi-era crimes, Walther Becker walked out of a German courtroom a free man. The judge in the case – who was later revealed to have his own Nazi sympathies – gave little credence to survivor testimony when he handed down his 1972 verdict.

In this clip, Sara Shapiro describes her initial refusal to leave her parents after they had arranged her escape, but because of her father's insistence, she and her brother fled the ghetto.

Mireille Knoll managed to survive the Nazis during the Holocaust, but antisemitism is ancient and tenacious, and its tentacles finally caught up with her last week at her home in Paris. The 85-year-old Knoll was stabbed 11 times and burned after attackers – a neighbor and a homeless man – tried to set her apartment ablaze. The men, both in their 20s, were later arrested for a crime that is being investigated as an antisemitic attack. “She’s a Jew, she must have money,” said one attacker to the other, according to Gérard Collomb, the interior minister of France.

Jennie Burnet, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Georgia State University, gave a public lecture at the Center for Advanced Genocide Research focusing on the intrinsic and extrinsic factors that influenced rescuer behavior during the 1994 genocide of Tutsis in Rwanda.

On March 15, Mélanie Péron from the French department at the University of Pennsylvania delivered a lecture on the research she conducted during her fellowship at the Center.

Kathryn Brackney, the 2017-2018 Katz Research Fellow in Genocide Studies, gave a public lecture on the research she conducted during her month in residence at the Center.

A Rohingya refugee’s account of her last days at home The Rohingya are a predominantly Muslim ethnic minority who have lived in Myanmar for hundreds of years but were effectively stripped of their citizenship by the Myanmar government (then known as Burma) and made stateless in 1982. A campaign of genocidal violence that began in August 2017 has pushed some 650,000 ethnic Rohingya from Myanmar to Bangladesh, where they live in what is now the largest refugee camp in the world.

Jamalida’s interview is among dozens of testimonies documented by USC Shoah Foundation since its arrival in November to the refugee camps in Bangladesh. A total of 11 life-history interviews with Rohingya are being added the Visual History Archive, the world’s largest repository of genocide testimony.

A presentation by Richard Hovannisian, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus, UCLA; Adjunct Professor, USC, & Presidential Fellow, Chapman University Whittier Central Library 7344 Washington Avenue Whittier, CA 90602

As an interpreter at Nuremberg, Edith Coliver had a front-row seat to many historic moments, such as the testimony of Hermann Göring, creator of the Gestapo.

David Adelman serves on USC Shoah Foundation’s Board of Councilors. David is the CEO of Campus Apartments LLC, a Philadelphia company that develops and operates on- and off-campus student housing. He is also the co-founder and vice chairman of FS Investments, a nationwide distributor of alternative investment products, and vice chairman of FS Investment Corporation, a publicly registered business development company focused on investing in the debt securities of private U.S. companies.