Within the Visual History Archive there are over 8,000 testimonies that reference France, over 1,600 that were conducted in the country and over 1,800 testimonies that were given in French.

David Faber recalls the anti-Semitism he experienced as a child in pre-WWII Poland. He describes numerous instances where he was abused physically and emotionally by non-Jewish children on his way to and from school.

Lili Meier describes how she found a photo album, which has become known as the Auschwitz Album, in a deserted SS barracks on the day she was liberated from the Dora concentration camp. The Auschwitz Album is the only known collection of photographs taken by the Nazi SS at Auschwitz-Birkenau. This testimony clip is featured in the IWitness activity Arrival at Auschwitz – Images and Individual Experiences.

Though her students are only 10 or 11 years old, Suzi Gantz jumped at the chance to introduce them to IWitness for USC Shoah Foundation’s first elementary classroom pilot of a new IWitness activity.Gantz’s fifth grade class at O. A. Thorp Scholastic Academy in Chicago is currently pilot-testing an unpublished IWitness Mini Quest activity: “Use Your Voice Against Prejudice.” USC Shoah Foundation staff reached out to elementary teachers in the Chicago area for any who would be interested in piloting an IWitness activity, and Gantz was selected after a brief screening process.

IWitness is typically used in middle- and high school classrooms and college courses, but that may change following this week’s pilot testing of a new activity intended for students as young as fifth grade.

For some people, hope is nothing but an airy dream. But for my parents, Elisabeth and George, it is a hard-won reality that they have lived every day of their lives. Their commitment is anything but naïve. They are both survivors of the Holocaust and have experienced anti-Semitism in all its forms. They’ve suffered more than most of us, God willing, will ever experience. And yet, their hope has been a source of redemption and new life.

USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education is pleased to announce that Ecole Normale Superieure (ENS), a university in Lyon, France, is the 51st institution, and the first in France, to gain full access to the Institute’s Visual History Archive, a repository of nearly 52,000 video testimonies from survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust and other genocides.