Los Angeles, Aug. 10, 2015 – USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research, in collaboration with the USC Thornton School of Music, will be hosting scholars from around the world for two days of programming on Oct. 10 - 11 to highlight the use of music as a tool to resist oppression and spread awareness.

Dachau camp liberator Barton Nagata talks about his exposure to racism in the segregated South of the United States.

Just in time for the new school year, the IWitness Activity Library has been completely redesigned in order to provide a better experience for educators.

Holocaust survivor George Brent was a violin prodigy as a child, but he thought his career was over when he endured physical torture during the Holocaust and injured his wrist. Years later, he was invited to perform in a concert with famed entertainer Maurice Chevalier, who gave him some much-needed encouragement onstage.

Time and again, we at USC Shoah Foundation witness how young people strive to make a difference. From middle school students to college graduates, we’ve had the pleasure to work with people inspired by testimony in the Visual History Archive. These young people are creating change and developing plans to improve their own communities.

USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research, in collaboration with the USC Thornton School of Music, will be hosting scholars from around the world for two days of programming on Oct. 10 - 11 to highlight the use of music as a tool to resist oppression and spread awareness.

Indexing USC Shoah Foundation’s new testimony collection from Jewish Family and Children’s Services (JFCS) of San Francisco was an ideal continuation of the work Nancy Saul has done for much of her career.Saul spent 10 years as the reference and information services librarian at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles and also ran the center’s “Ask a Survivor” outreach program, so she was no stranger to testimony when she began working on the JFCS collection at USC Shoah Foundation in January 2014.

The psychological focus of the testimonies in the Institute's new collection from Jewish Family and Children's Services (JFCS) of San Francisco meant that a new set of indexing terms had to be researched and developed.

Helen describes her experiences as a laborer in Menden, Germany. She escaped scrutiny for being Jewish by lying to authorities about her ethnic background. She describes the immense fear that came throughout these experiences, always worrying about Nazi officers incriminating her.

With the 2015 Ambassadors for Humanity Gala in Detroit just a month away, local students experienced IWitness in their own backyard, at the Henry Ford Museum.

United States Armed Forces veteran Leonard Lubin fought on the western front and liberated concentration camps in Austria. After war ended in Europe he waited along with his comrades to be deployed to the Pacific. He describes hearing about the atomic bombing of Japan and that war had ended in WWII when Japan surrendered to the Allies on August 15, 1945.

Zach Albert’s journey to USC Shoah Foundation to work as an indexer on the Jewish Family and Children’s Services (JFCS) of San Francisco Holocaust testimony collection began when he was 12 years old and preparing for his bar mitzvah.Albert was volunteering at the Dallas Holocaust Museum and had become totally captivated by the survivors he met there – they were like his surrogate grandparents, he said. When it came time for him to decide on a community service project for his bar mitzvah, he noticed that the museum was lacking something important: a Torah scroll.

Former congresswoman and war crimes trial participant Elizabeth Holtzman remembers working with Julian Bond during the Civil Rights Movement during the 1960’s.

Teachers participating in Facing History and Ourselves’s “Holocaust and Human Behavior” seminar spent a day at USC last week learning how to use IWitness to teach about the Holocaust, genocide, tolerance and other topics.

While her fellow indexers focused on mainly English-language testimonies in USC Shoah Foundation’s new collection from Jewish Family and Children’s Services (JFCS) of San Francisco, Svetlana Ushakova indexed testimonies of Holocaust survivors from her native Russia – who at times felt like her own friends.With a PhD in Russian History from Novosibirsk University, Ushakova joined the JFCS collection with expertise in pre-war Soviet history, though she had not worked very closely with oral history testimonies before.

Educators are invited to participate in a free IWitness webinar Thurs., Aug. 20 at 4 p.m. PST, to learn more about integrating IWitness into their curriculum.

Rita Berger describes what happened to her father and older brother during the Polenaktion, Oct. 27-30, 1938. The Polenaktion was the expulsion of 1,500 to 6,000 Jews from Berlin, who were then forced to go to Poland.

Jan Karski recognized as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem for risking his life in order to alert the world about the Holocaust. For World Humanitarian Day Karski speaks on the importance of standing up against intolerance.

Armin T. Wegner was in the German Sanitary Corps and was posted to Eastern Turkey during WWI.  There he was witness to the genocide of the Armenian people. Seeing the devastating consequences of the deportations he documented the genocide in photographs, keeping meticulous notes at great personal risk.Wegner was arrested for his covert documentation, but was able to smuggle his photographs back to Germany. These photographs were later used in German Court as evidence that genocide had indeed taken place in Eastern Anatolia against the Armenian people.

By spending a year in Los Angeles as USC Shoah Foundation’s Austrian Holocaust Memorial Service intern, Florian Köppl is fulfilling a lifelong dream.Köppl is the 12th young man from Austria to work at USC Shoah Foundation as an alternative to his compulsory military service back home. The Austrian Holocaust Memorial Service, founded by Andreas Maislinger, places accepted applicants at Holocaust memorial institutions around the world, where they live and work for one year.

After watching testimony in the Visual History Archive, many students say they feel like they really “met” the survivors they watched. Véronique Mickisch actually did.

Esther Fiszman immigrated to Australia after the Holocaust and found the people she met there to be kind, helpful and accepting. There were very few Jewish people in her town but she never experienced any anti-Semitism there.

USC Shoah Foundation Australia Regional Consultant Sarah Warby will speak about the power of teaching with testimony at Knox Grammar School’s Practicing Positive Education conference in Sydney, Aug. 28-29.

It wasn’t until she wrote her book A Guest at the Shooter’s Banquet, available now, that Rita Gabis learned the truth about her family’s complicated past.

Fay Aronowicz talks about the Poligon Massacre in Lithuania in October 1941, in which 8,000 Jews were murdered. A Lithuanian police officer allowed her to leave the site of the impending massacre, but her mother had to stay behind.

The four undergraduates working with USC Shoah Foundation during the summer Research in Industrial Projects for Students (RIPS) program at UCLA presented their new method for achieving more relevant search results in the Visual History Archive to staff on Wednesday.

Testimony clip of Norma Dimitry was subtitled into Czech, for a presentation in Czech Republic on teaching about the refugee crisis with testimony.

I invite you to view a clip of Norma Dimitry’s testimony. The clip is subtitled into Czech, just in case some of my fellow Czechs were interested in learning more about the last time our country provided at least a safe transit route if not a safe haven to a mass of people.

The President of the Republic went on record to tell the prospective immigrants “nobody invited you here!” Refugees escaping from a murderous regime are regarded as agents of that very regime. Concerned citizens who never saw a refugee discuss them with great fear: refugees will take our jobs, kill our wives, rape our daughters. “We may take a few of those who can prove they are and always were Christians,” some interior ministry clerk declared.

When watching a testimony in the Visual History Archive, Liliane Weissberg pays close attention to the words the survivor is saying, and, just as importantly, to the silences in between those words.