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.

Griffin Williams is challenging assumptions held by some of the most famous names in Holocaust scholarship as a DEFY Undergraduate Research Fellow at USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research this summer.

During his two-week internship at USC Shoah Foundation this summer, Ohio 10th grader Dov Ratner is testing the latest New Dimensions in Testimony interviews by asking the computer system questions for each survivor and noting the accuracy of the responses he receives in return. But there’s one interviewee he doesn’t need New Dimensions in Testimony to have a conversation with: Holocaust survivor Renee Firestone, his great-grandmother.

Acadia Grantham decided to take action against bullying in her IWitness Video Challenge entry, “Silence,” which won second place in the 2017 national contest. The IWitness Video Challenge asks students to submit short videos to show how they were inspired by testimony to make positive choices and create value in their community. The contest is open to middle and high school students across the United States and Canada (except Quebec). 

Working on assignment from her teacher Katherine Rastrick, Acadia Grantham constructed a video about speaking out against bullying and won second place in the 2017 IWitness Video Challenge.

Shayna Kantor turned her passion for American Sign Language into her third-place winning IWitness Video Challenge project.

Sarah Pitcher-Hoffman can count herself as part of an elite club: teachers whose students have placed in the IWitness Video Challenge not once, not twice, but three times. Pitcher-Hoffman’s student Shayna Kantor won third place in the 2017 IWitness Video Challenge. Her student last year, Lanna Knoll, and three years ago, Ruby Merritt and Ayva Schiff, were all regional winners in the challenge.

For a century, Michael Rettig’s family has passed down boxes upon boxes of photographs, papers, records and other documents. But because most of it was written in Armenian, no one knew much about what it all meant. When his grandmother invited him to take a look, Rettig became eager to investigate, to fill in the gaps in both scholarly research and his family's own knowledge about their fascinating history. 

David Hales’ dedication to IWitness has taken him from Michigan to Prague. Hales is the social studies consultant for Wayne Regional Educational Service Agency, helping to bring best practices to classrooms in the 33 school districts in Wayne County, Mich., through teacher trainings, workshops and meetings. He was introduced to IWitness through USC Shoah Foundation’s IWitness Detroit program, which launched in 2015 in order to expand the use of IWitness in Michigan.

He was under five years old at the time, but World War II left an indelible mark on Louis Schmidt. He’s never forgotten the air raid drills, seeing his uncles in military uniform, or looking at pictures of prisoners of war in Life magazine. So when Steven Spielberg announced after he won the Oscar for Schindler’s List in 1994 that he was setting up a foundation to record interviews with 50,000 Holocaust survivors, Schmidt didn’t hesitate.

Suzi Weiss-Fischmann’s mother survived Auschwitz because upon arrival to the camp she was sent to the line to the right designated for slave labor. Her grandmother and uncles were directed to the left, to die in gas chambers because they were considered too old or too young to work.

As a documentary filmmaker, historian and curator, Christian Delage has long consulted with and used video testimonies of Holocaust survivors in his work.

Hilda Mantelmacher’s life features many defining moments, yet three in particular stand apart from the rest: going through the Holocaust; an episode of 60 Minutes; and the film Schindler’s List.

At the behest of his father, 17-year-old Erwin Rautenberg boarded a steamer for South America in 1937 to escape Nazi Germany. His brother, sister, and parents planned to join him, but never made it. His father died in 1938, soon after being
forced into the German army. The rest of the family was killed during the Holocaust.

Armed with insights gathered during her two-week research trip to USC Shoah Foundation, Professor Maria Rita Corticelli is ready to begin building an archive of testimonies of minority groups who have experienced various forms of mass violence, including genocide and ethnic cleansing, in Iraq. “It’s something that is absolutely missing because there is nothing on Iraq regarding genocides committed there, not only the last one by ISIS but the ones committed before,” Corticelli said. “There is no centralized database where these testimonies are together.”

Less than a week after the neo-Nazi rallies in Charlottesville, Virginia, USC Shoah Foundation received a call from Blake Humphrey, student body president of West Virginia University. How could he work with USC Shoah Foundation to speak out against this blatant display of hatred and bigotry?