Roma and Sinti survivor Ella Davis describes how she was punished for getting caught stealing potatoes at Auschwitz.

A group of dedicated USC students is reviving the Shoah Foundation Institute Student Association (SFISA).

Giulia Spizzichino, who gave her testimony in Italian on March 25, 1998, speaks about the Ardeatine Caves Massacre that took place outside Rome on March 24, 1944. In one of the worst massacres in Italy during World War II, over 300 Italian men were shot, in retaliation for an attack on SS personnel by resistance fighters. The previous day, the Patriotic Action Group (Gruppi d'Azione Patriotica, or GAP) set off a bomb that killed 33 German soldiers marching on Via Rassella. Hitler made an order that within 24 hours, 10 Italians were to be shot for each dead German.

What are the pillars of modern democracy and how can democracy be defended in days of crisis?

These questions keep coming to me these days, when Poland faces a really serious crisis that so far has caused a huge polarization in Polish society that divides neighbors, colleagues, friends, even families.

Being an educator for almost 30 years, teaching first young students, then teenagers and finally teachers about history, civil rights and human rights, I have realized what a huge setback the Polish educational system has suffered.

Gerson Adler recalls the Stürmer newspaper issued by the Nazi party that promulgated antisemitic stereotypes.

Gerda describes being liberated by the United States Army and encountering her future husband, U.S. Army Lt. Kurt Klein, in Volary, Czechoslovakia, in May 1945. Gerda Klein was born Gerda Weissmann on May 8, 1924, in Bielsko, Poland. Gerda and her brother, Arthur, grew up relatively unaware of the spread of Nazism, until Poland was invaded in 1939; soon after, Arthur was taken away on a transport. In April 1942, Gerda and her parents were ordered into the Bielsko ghetto.

In this clip, Henry Sinason, a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, recalls how widespread Nazi antisemitic propaganda was all over the city where he lived.

Board members, senior staff and other supporters of USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education are traveling throughout Hungary and Poland this week on the Institute’s mission to Eastern Europe.