Filter by content type:

The film was honored with the Creative Arts Award, VR – Documentary Jury Prize, at the awards ceremony held at the Warner Bros. Studio in Hollywood.
/ Tuesday, February 13, 2018
February is Black History Month, a time to acknowledge and celebrate the central role African Americans have made in the United States. In honor of this special time, we invite educators and students to remember history in their classrooms, utilizing this year’s thematic lens, “African Americans in Times of War.”
/ Tuesday, February 13, 2018
By collecting clips of testimony to construct a "GeoStory" - a map and timeline with videos - students can discover how changes in time and place shape history.
iwitness, geostory, education / Friday, February 16, 2018
At the exact moment a former student was destroying lives at Stoneman Douglas High School, a group of students inside a classroom was studying ways to make the world a better place. These were students in a Holocaust history class, where they were exploring the 1936 Olympics in an IWitness learning activity to teach them about compassion and respect, and about the perils of living a life filled with hate and violence.
op-eds / Friday, February 16, 2018
Lecture by Trinity College history professor Samuel Kassow lays out the unique circumstances leading to the legendary battle. The 75th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising will be on April 19.
/ Thursday, February 22, 2018
USC Shoah Foundation's Karen Jungblut speaks at The Berlin Conference on Myanmar Genocide about the nearly 100 video interviews recorded in Bangladesh refugee camps.
GAM / Tuesday, February 27, 2018
The USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research invites research proposals from USC undergraduate students and USC graduate students for the inaugural Beth and Arthur Lev Student Research Fellowship.
cagr / Friday, March 2, 2018
We are sorry to hear about the recent passing of Jim Sanders, who wrote a book chronicling his experience liberating Nazi concentration camps during World War II. Sanders was recognized by USC Shoah Foundation at its 2012 Ambassadors for Humanity gala, and he gave testimony to the Institute’s Visual History Archive.
/ Tuesday, March 6, 2018
Two of the three Center Summer 2017 research fellows gathered to publicly present and discuss their research using the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive (VHA).
cagr / Wednesday, March 7, 2018
Philippe Sands, Professor of Law and Director of the Centre on International Courts and Tribunals at University College London, gave a public lecture at the USC Gould School of Law focusing on his recent book "East West Street: On the Origins of 'Genocide' and 'Crimes Against Humanity'".
cagr / Wednesday, March 7, 2018
In honor of International Women's Day, USC Shoah Foundation is revisiting the story of the late Vera Laska, who joined the Czech resistance as a teenager and escorted dozens of Jews to safety in the snowy mountains of southern Slovakia.
/ Thursday, March 8, 2018
The more than 1,000 interviews will constitute the largest non-Holocaust-related collection to be integrated into the Institute’s Visual History Archive. It will also be the Archive’s first audio-only collection.
GAM, collections, armenia / Thursday, March 8, 2018
USC Shoah Foundation is saddened to learn about the passing of Kalman Aron, a Holocaust survivor who created in paint the horrors he witnessed during World War II. He died on Feb. 24. He was 93.
/ Wednesday, March 14, 2018
USC Shoah Foundation is deeply saddened by the passing of Hannah Kent, who survived three concentration camps and a death march, but went on to live a full life filled with love, family and resolve. She was 88. Born Hanka Szarkman on Oct. 9, 1929, in Lodz, Poland, Hannah Kent was the wife of Roman Kent, a Life Member of USC Shoah Foundation’s Board of Councilors and a leader in the Holocaust survivor movement. Hannah and Roman Kent met in New York after World War II and married in 1957. They had two children, Jeffrey and Susan.
obituary / Thursday, February 15, 2018
The release follows the recent completion of 489 interviews with the survivors of the Guatemala Genocide at the hands of the Guatemalan military in the early 1980s.
fafg, Guatemala, Guatemalan Genocide, iwitness, GAM / Wednesday, March 14, 2018
“My mother very rarely spoke about the Holocaust or about what happened to her or how she, my father, my brother and myself survived the Holocaust as a complete family,” said Eddy Boas, whose book "I Am Not A Victim -- I Am A Survivor" chronicles the story of his family. “But the inspiration for my story actually came from the interview my mother did with USC Shoah Foundation in March 1995 – she would only participate in the interview if I was allowed to sit next to her.”
Eddy Boas, second generation, 2G / Wednesday, March 21, 2018
It’s hard to imagine I’m even typing this sentence, but an avowed Holocaust denier on Tuesday became the official Republican nominee for an upcoming congressional election in Illinois. Arthur Jones won the primary despite the fact that he once led the American Nazi Party and has freely shared his antisemitic views. Perhaps even more disturbing is the fact that Arthur Jones received more than 20,000 votes, according to preliminary results.
op-eds / Friday, March 23, 2018
Living through the Holocaust was such a strange and overwhelming experience, survivors often found it difficult to find ways to describe it. In her lecture “Phantom Geographies in Representations of the Holocaust” hosted by USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Studies on March 22, Kathryn Brackney identified survivors who talked about living in a world outside of time and place, where even the laws of nature fell apart.
cagr, lecture summary, lecture, katz fellow / Monday, March 26, 2018
During the trials, she worked as a research analyst. Her command of the English and German languages made her an invaluable resource to the prosecution.
Women at Nuremberg, Nuremberg Trials, Jane Lester / Monday, March 26, 2018
Despite the testimony of many witnesses to his Nazi-era crimes, Walther Becker walked out of a German courtroom a free man. The judge in the case – who was later revealed to have his own Nazi sympathies – gave little credence to survivor testimony when he handed down his 1972 verdict.
christopher browning, mickey shapiro, GAM / Thursday, March 29, 2018
Mireille Knoll managed to survive the Nazis during the Holocaust, but antisemitism is ancient and tenacious, and its tentacles finally caught up with her last week at her home in Paris. The 85-year-old Knoll was stabbed 11 times and burned after attackers – a neighbor and a homeless man – tried to set her apartment ablaze. The men, both in their 20s, were later arrested for a crime that is being investigated as an antisemitic attack. “She’s a Jew, she must have money,” said one attacker to the other, according to Gérard Collomb, the interior minister of France.
op-eds / Friday, March 30, 2018
Jennie Burnet, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Georgia State University, gave a public lecture at the Center for Advanced Genocide Research focusing on the intrinsic and extrinsic factors that influenced rescuer behavior during the 1994 genocide of Tutsis in Rwanda.
cagr / Monday, April 2, 2018
On March 15, Mélanie Péron from the French department at the University of Pennsylvania delivered a lecture on the research she conducted during her fellowship at the Center.
cagr / Monday, April 2, 2018
Kathryn Brackney, the 2017-2018 Katz Research Fellow in Genocide Studies, gave a public lecture on the research she conducted during her month in residence at the Center.
cagr / Monday, April 2, 2018
Jamalida’s interview is among dozens of testimonies documented by USC Shoah Foundation since its arrival in November to the refugee camps in Bangladesh. A total of 11 life-history interviews with Rohingya are being added the Visual History Archive, the world’s largest repository of genocide testimony.
Rohingya, GAM / Tuesday, April 3, 2018
As an interpreter at Nuremberg, Edith Coliver had a front-row seat to many historic moments, such as the testimony of Hermann Göring, creator of the Gestapo.
Edith Coliver, Nuremberg Trials, GAM / Wednesday, April 4, 2018
It’s a story my grandfather never told me, something that I only heard and understood later, years after my mother recounted it. In 1943, after his first wife and children were killed, my grandfather, Sam Wasserman, participated in one of the only successful mass escapes from a Nazi extermination camp. He and hundreds of other prisoners, overwhelmed and killed several guards and escaped the Sobibor death camp in Poland. My grandfather eluded capture, joined a band of partisans fighting the Nazis, and shortly after surviving the war, met the woman who would become my grandmother.
op-eds / Monday, April 9, 2018
Through their testimonies on the Visual History Archive and The 1939 Society websites, Holocaust survivors and rescuers have inspired middle and high school students from across the nation and eight countries outside of the United States to become “Messengers of Memory,” the theme of this year’s Annual Holocaust Art and Writing Contest sponsored by Chapman University and The 1939 Society.
Holocaust survivors, Chapman University, contest, The 1939 Society / Thursday, April 12, 2018
Born Nachman Aaron Elster in 1933, in Poland, Elster escaped persecution and came to the United States in June of 1947. There, he gained an education in Chicago, served in the armed forces during the Korean War, married and had children. To remain in touch with his heritage and to spread awareness about his experiences and lessons learned from the Holocaust, he served as vice president and gave regular talks at the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center.
DiT / Friday, April 13, 2018
When USC Shoah Foundation’s Manuk Avedikyan was researching the Institute’s new oral-history collection of Armenian Genocide survivors, something unusual caught his eye.
GAM / Friday, April 13, 2018

Pages