USC Shoah Foundation is saddened to learn of the passing of Holocaust survivor Curt Lowens, a wartime hero who became a well-known character actor when he moved to the United States. He was 91. Born Curt Lowenstein on Nov. 17, 1925 in Germany, Lowen and his family had planned to emigrate to the United States as World War II was starting, but they were stopped from leaving the Netherlands when the Germans invaded that country. He was briefly deported to the Westerbork concentration camp in 1943, but he was released because of his father’s business connections.

Omer Bartov gave a lecture on May 8, 2017, on how the East Galician town of Buczacz was transformed from a site of coexistence, where Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews had lived side-by-side for centuries, into a site of genocide. What were the reasons for this instance of communal violence, what were its dynamics, and why has it been erased from the local memory? Professor Bartov is the 2017 Sara and Asa Shapiro Scholar at USC Center for Advanced Genocide Research.

The first-ever recipient of USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research’s Genocide Prevention Research Fellowship is Vanessa Belén Dorda Meneses, a PhD candidate from the University of Chile.

USC Shoah Foundation is saddened to learn of the passing of Holocaust survivor Curt Lowens, a wartime hero who became a well-known character actor when he moved to the United States. He was 91. Born Curt Lowenstein on Nov. 17, 1925 in Germany, Lowen and his family had planned to emigrate to the United States as World War II was starting, but they were stopped from leaving the Netherlands when the Germans invaded that country. He was briefly deported to the Westerbork concentration camp in 1943, but he was released because of his father’s business connections.