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"During the Holocaust I was living in a cocoon, with blinders. I lived completely in the present moment, because at any second, any Nazi, any German, any Kapo, could do away with me. You were like a gnat that they could squash. So, you lived inside a cocoon and hoped that one the day the butterfly would come out."
This talk examines the facets of Jewish women's agency in different contexts during the Holocaust in Transnistria, where Jews and Roma from Bessarabia and Bukovina were deported by Romanian authorities in 1941 and 1942 and where local Ukrainian Jews were brought from neighboring localities.
Nicholas Bredie (PhD candidate in Literature and Creative Writing, USC) conducted research to contribute to a hybrid work of fiction and non-fiction centered around the life history of his great aunt, who was murdered in 1945 in the Neuengamme concentration camp.
In this lecture, Barnabas Balint—PhD candidate in History, Magdalen College, University of Oxford, UK, and 2021-2022 Breslauer, Rutman, and Anderson Research Fellow—examines how the identities of this interwar generation were formed in times of crisis for the Jewish community, how their roles and agency in society changed, and how the institutions they were connected to reacted to persecution. He analyzes the subjective and personal ways young people experienced their age during the Holocaust in Hungary.
In recounting the past, Holocaust survivors deliberately or unconsciously craft the stories they recount about the Shoah. Whether through literature, memoirs, or testimony, survivors shape stories about the past while signaling what remains unsaid. Deferred memories - stories told many decades after the events occurred - often address issues that survivors did not dare or could not bear to recount earlier.
Joseph Greenblatt believes it was the antisemitic taunts he endured throughout his childhood in Warsaw that led him to a life of resistance. He was a key player in the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and then took on the Germans again, this time with the Polish Home Army in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 — for which he later received a medal.
Greenblatt’s testimony, recorded in New York City in 1996, is contained in USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive.
USC Shoah Foundation is saddened to learn about the passing of Max Glauben, a child survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, the Majdanek and Dachau concentration camps, and a veteran of the United States Army. In 2018, Max was interviewed by USC Shoah Foundation, in association with the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum—a center he helped found—for the interactive Dimensions in Testimony exhibit. He recorded his original video testimony for USC Shoah Foundation in Dallas, Texas in 1996.
USC Shoah Foundation worked closely with The Survivor team to bring the important film to the screen and received a production credit. Assistance included providing access to Haft’s and other survivors’ testimonies in the Visual History Archive, and consulting with the producers to ensure historical accuracy.
Crispin Brooks is curator of the Visual History Archive and over the years has played a key role in archiving its testimonies. He is also immersed in Eastern European studies. He spoke to us about consulting on The Survivor.
USC Shoah Foundation last week joined President Joe Biden and his wife Jill Biden for a screening of HBO’s new Holocaust film The Survivor—the first official showing of a film in the White House theater since the president assumed office.
"It's impossible to describe the euphoria, the happiness that we finally, finally are coming home." Moshe Shamir survived slave labor camps and a ghetto in Transnistria. He was on his way to Palestine in 1947 when British border patrol diverted his ship to Cyprus and placed him in an internment camp. He was still in that camp on Friday, May 14, 1948 when he learned of the establishment of the State of Israel.