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.

In this lecture, Philippe Sands discusses his most recent book East West Street: On the Origins of 'Genocide' and 'Crimes Against Humanity' — part historical detective story, part family history, part legal thriller — to connect his work on 'crimes against humanity' and 'genocide', the events that overwhelmed his family in Lviv during World War II, and the untold story at the heart of the Nuremberg trial that pits lawyers Rafael Lemkin and Hersch Lauterpacht against Hans Frank, defendant number 7, former Governor General of Nazi-occupied Poland and Adolf Hitler's lawyer.

Stephen Smith, USC Shoah Foundation’s executive director, will sit on a panel Wednesday evening that will discuss the ways in which alternate reality and virtual reality will alter the accepted norms of human-computer interaction.

Georgia State University professor Jennie Burnet lectures on the moment-by-moment changing landscape of the genocide against the Tutsis in Rwanda that resists efforts to formulate a structural model of rescuer behavior.

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.

Dr. Vera Laska describes how, as a teenager, she began helping Jews and French political prisoners cross the mountains from Slovakia into Hungary.

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).

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'".

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.

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.

Sarkis Miranian was born in 1908 or after in Yeghekis (present-day Göllü) in the current province of Bitlis, a village nestled in a valley on the southern shores of Lake Van. He describes the situation in his village right before the Genocide began in the Van region as well as the immediate impact it had on his family.  This audio clip is a part of the Richard G. Hovannisian Armenian Genocide Oral History Collection which is an audio only collection.

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.

Lucía Samayoa was born in Guatemala, and, after moving away at age 6, was schooled in various countries throughout Latin America. But it wasn’t really until last year, when she started working at Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation (FAFG) in Guatemala City, that the 30-year-old really gained a deeper understanding of the genocide that killed roughly 200,000 civilians – mainly indigenous Mayans – at the hands of the Guatemalan military in the early 1980s.

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.

Sandra Patricia García Paredes, a survivor of the Guatemalan genocide, speaks about her attempt to escape from the soldiers who kidnapped her. A clip of her testimony appears in the IWitness activity, “The Mechanisms of Violence Used During the Armed Conflict.”

“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.”

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.

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.

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.

In this clip from her testimony, Jane Lester talks about the relative gender equality that existed in her work environment during the Nuremberg Trials.

Nurusseher is a Rohingya refugee. An English transcript of Nurusseher's message is below:

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.

In this clip, Sara Shapiro describes her initial refusal to leave her parents after they had arranged her escape, but because of her father's insistence, she and her brother fled the ghetto.

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.