We are saddened to hear of the recent passing of Jack Welner, who survived a Jewish ghetto in Poland, a labor camp near the Dachau concentration camp in Germany, and the Auschwitz Nazi death camp in Poland – where his mother was murdered on arrival – before immigrating to Denver, Colorado, where he began a new life. He was 98.

When Welner gave his testimony to USC Shoah Foundation in 1995, it changed his life.

Clara Isaacman (née Heller) was born in Borsa, Romania, before WWII. Due to rampant anti-Semitism, her family left Romania and moved to Antwerp, Belgium in
the late 1920s, when Clara was a child. Clara’s father, Shalom, was in the diamond business and owned a soda factory. Clara attended a Hebrew school and a public
school in Antwerp.

Max Glauben was 13 when his family’s apartment was destroyed in the historic battle of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

Eva Kuper was 2 when her mother’s cousin rescued her from a train in the frantic moments before it headed to the Treblinka death camp.

Both lost parents and other relatives in the Holocaust. And both are among the four Holocaust survivors whose testimonies USC Shoah Foundation is recording this week using cutting-edge, 360-degree filming techniques at the physical locations of their pre-war and wartime experiences, as well as their places of liberation.

Sonia Klein (née Joskowicz) was born on June 16, 1925 in Warsaw, Poland. Her parents Itzack and Jospa Joskowicz, ran a family business selling fruit, vegetables, wood, and coal. Sonia was the oldest of three children; she had a sister and a brother. Before the war, she attended a public school and aspired to be a teacher.

In 2020, on Indigenous Peoples' Day (formerly known as Columbus Day) -- October 12, 2020 -- the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research will launch a three-day international conference entitled “Mass Violence and Its Lasting Impact on Indigenous Peoples - The Case of the Americas and Australia/Pacific Region”.