I expected to feel an intimate and profound connection to Auschwitz after touring the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum for the first time late last month. After three consecutive days visiting and working at the museum, I was indeed moved. But the insight I was hoping for came from beyond the well-worn paths of tourists, from a source that hits close to home here at USC Shoah Foundation.

Kurt Messerschmidt is one of the most recognizable faces on IWitness, and his Information Quest allows students to learn more about his life and how he survived the Holocaust.

Students are asked to engage with primary and secondary sources and construct a short video essay on the nature of contemporary anti-Semitism.

Seventeen countries, 28 states and 122 cities later, the USC Shoah Foundation 20th Anniversary Guest Book is officially closed.

USC students have until March 16, 2015 to enter this year’s Student Voices Short Film Contest.

Three weeks ago, USC Shoah Foundation gathered in Poland to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. And just last week, staff from the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews returned the favor.

As I completed the transaction for my first foray with Airbnb for a trip to Paris with my daughter, I was pleasantly surprised by the note that popped up from Christophe, the manager, who alerted me that I could also have a ride from the airport with Karyn with whom he has an arrangement. 

Testimony can be intense, heart-wrenching, and emotional. It can include stories that are harrowing or even hopeful. And it can also be poetic.

Kori Street, USC Shoah Foundation Director of Education, will join other education experts for a panel discussion at the Responsibility 2015 conference in New York City, which will commemorate the centennial anniversary of the Armenian Genocide.

USC Shoah Foundation and its Center for Advanced Genocide Research are hosting two events this week that are free and open to the public.

After displaying testimonies from the Visual History Archive in its exhibit The Orient in Bohemia this fall, the Jewish Museum in Prague continues utilizing filmed testimony in its latest exhibit: “Shattered Hopes: Postwar Czechoslovakia as a Crossroads of Jewish Life.”

USC Shoah Foundation is pleased to announce Stephen A. Cozen as chairman of its Board of Councilors.

Auschwitz, the final destination of Jewish people from across Europe destined to be murdered as a part of the Nazi genocide of the Jews. Auschwitz, a place that housed prisoners of many religions, persuasions, minorities and nationalities, but whose evil reputation is seared onto our collective conscience because the five gas chambers at Birkenau were there for one reason only - to devour the lives of 960,000 Jews. Auschwitz, which has evolved into a universal symbol of man's inhumanity to man – and indeed it does remind us just how cruel human beings can be.

A Holocaust studies professor from the Russian State University for Humanities in Moscow has been awarded the 2015-16 Center Fellowship by USC Shoah Foundation’s Center for Advanced Genocide Research.

The four-year project will identify and develop resources, activities and pathways into IWitness that will be appropriate and effective for teaching the Holocaust and other topics at Jewish day schools of all denominations.

When I met Auschwitz survivor Eva Mozes Kor in January, she was dozing on a chair that doubles as her walker, wearing a contented smile while a flurry of activity buzzed around her. 

During her lecture as the 2014-15 Center Fellow of the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research on Thursday at USC Doheny Memorial Library, Peg LeVine shared her experiences studying a unique form of violence during the Cambodian Genocide.

Wolf Gruner, Director of the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research, has published two new books about discriminatory policies against two distinct groups: the Jews in the annexed territories of the Third Reich and the indigenous people of Bolivia in the 19th century.

USC Shoah Foundation is pleased to provide closed captioning for IWitness activities and the IWitness Video Challenge, thanks to a grant from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation.

Three students from Budapest wrote short stories and poems inspired by testimony that they hope will teach others the importance of acceptance and remembrance.

Most students are probably familiar with the iconic image of an immigrant sailing into New York Harbor under the welcoming arms of the Statue of Liberty. The activity "New Beginnings – Journey to America" introduces students to real people who did just that.

We are hiding from the fact that subsequent to Haman, Hitler was successful in carrying out the genocide of the Jews and the survivors of the Holocaust are better examples than Mordechai or Esther.

With IWitness in Rwanda entering its third year, organizing partners and educators came together in Kigali last week for a reflective workshop that revealed the incredible impact IWitness has already had on students and teachers.

On March 8, 2015 there will be events all over the world celebrating the achievements of women for International Women’s Day. This year’s theme Make it Happen encourages action for advancing women’s rights and also recognizing the incredible and courageous work women do in various industries throughout the world.

Jeannie Woods was the only person from her school in Fort Payne, Al., to travel to Poland for "Auschwitz: The Past is Present," but she made sure she wasn't the only one to experience it.

In February, I participated in an international conference titled Are we losing memory? Forgotten sites of Nazi forced labor in Central Europe. The event organized by the Terezin Initiative Institute and the North Bohemian Museum in Liberec brought together educators, researchers, archeologists and other experts from the Czech Republic, Poland and Germany to examine the disconnect between history of forced labor and regional history caused by the ethnic cleansing and population transfers after WWII in regions that were part of the German Reich.  

USC Shoah Foundation Executive Director Stephen Smith was invited to speak at the Council of American Jewish Museums (CAJM)’s annual conference and the Ararat Home of Los Angeles’s Armenian Genocide Centennial Commemoration.

On Tuesday, March 10, 2015, the USC Center for Advanced Genocide Research hosted a lecture from Dr. Peter Hayes who spoke before a packed room at USC on the complex relationship between anti-Semitism and homophobia exerted in Nazi-occupied territories during World War II. The Theodore Zev Weiss Holocaust Educational Foundation Professor at Northwestern University specializes in 20th-century German History, writing extensively on German industry under the Nazis. Monday's lecture, however, focused on the evolution of his views on a comparison that he was previously reluctant to address.

These resources make it possible for anyone to embark on the IWalks and hear the stories of survivors in the authentic locations where they experienced the Holocaust.