Roza Petrosyan graduated with honors from USC with Bachelor Degrees in history and social psychology, as well as a minor in Russian area studies. She interned at the USC Shoah Foundation for three years and continues to work at the Institute as a researcher. In the fall, Roza will attend USC Gould School of Law with the hopes of becoming a human rights advocate.

When I was a child, my grandfather often told me about the Second World War. While he sat next to me, coloring or teaching me letters of the alphabet, he would sneak in a story about his days in the Soviet army. He would tell me about his post as a commander of a marine unit and how his forces liberated an Austrian town under Nazi occupation.

Sol Messinger was a young boy, nearly seven, when he boarded the ship St. Louis with his family. He describes the voyage from Germany to Cuba. St. Louis was a German ship carrying Jewish refugees who were not permitted to disembark in Havana, Cuba, upon their arrival on May 27, 1939. Sol’s testimony is featured in the  IWitness activity, Voyage of the St. Louis: From Hope to Despair.

IWitness (and survivor Roman Kent) has had a profound effect on the entire eighth grade class at Saraland Middle School in Alabama, says teacher Donna Hughes.Hughes teaches eighth grade language arts and seventh grade journalism, and learned about IWitness at an Echoes and Reflections workshop. She has since incorporated testimony into her Holocaust curriculum in order to supplement her students’ reading and provide them access to real survivors, she said.

The newest activity in IWitness provides students with an opportunity to learn about the ill-fated voyage of the MS St. Louis in 1939.

February 18, 2014: In our current digital landscape, information is available at a much faster speed, from a larger variety of sources, and through new mediums. This availability of resources has changed not just the way society stays informed, but the way academic subjects are both explored and taught.The discussion “Finding the Human in Digital Humanities: How Many Bytes Does it take to Get to the Center?” was moderated by Kori Street, director of education at the USC Shoah Foundation.