Jacqueline Semha Gmach traveled to Paris last month to oversee the recording of four testimonies for USC Shoah Foundation’s new North Africa and Middle East collection, and returned inspired and awed by the interviewees and their experiences.

Ruth Pearl is best known as the mother of late American journalist Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal’s South Asia Bureau Chief, who was kidnapped and murdered in Pakistan by terrorists in 2002. But it is her own life story that is preserved as part of USC Shoah Foundation’s new collection of testimonies from North Africa and the Middle East.