The Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum this month became the second in the world to install a permanent theater to display Dimensions in Testimony – an interactive, holographic project developed by USC Shoah Foundation that will allow visitors to interact with a Holocaust survivor long after they are no longer with us.
Filter by content type:
Filter by date:
When Ursula Martens was a little girl living in Germany, she was happy to be forced by law at age 10 to join the Hitler Youth.
“Everything was free,” she said. “You could go to theaters. … They would send you on vacations with other children at nice resorts.”
It wasn’t until she was a little older that she realized something was wrong.
Leading up to the one-year anniversary of the deadly synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh, USC Shoah Foundation staff members trained educators in that metro area last week about how to use video testimonies of Holocaust witnesses as a tool to teach empathy, understanding and respect.
An ISIS commander. Victims of the Cambodian and Bosnian genocides. Inmates at Guantanamo Bay.
They are among the many subjects portrayed in the work of three women who spoke this week about their experiences as journalists and filmmakers working in conflict zones and with traumatized individuals on a USC Visions & Voices panel jointly organized by USC Shoah Foundation and the USC Fisher Museum of Art.
Today we mourn the loss of one of our closest friends, Branko Lustig, a Holocaust survivor and two-time Academy Award winner who produced Schindler’s List and played an indispensable role in the founding of USC Shoah Foundation. He was 87.
Shortly after the film’s 1993 release, Lustig -- who witnessed horrific atrocities at Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and other concentration and labor camps -- led the drive to implement Steven Spielberg’s vision of collecting 50,000 Holocaust testimonies for what was then called Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation.
In China, the number of people still alive who survived the 1937 Nanjing Massacre at the hands of Japanese invaders has fallen to minuscule levels – some experts put the number around 80.
USC Shoah Foundation’s collection of about 100 testimonies of survivors from this rampage that killed some 300,000 civilians and unarmed soldiers includes the vast majority of them.
This fall, the Institute reached a milestone: The entire collection of Nanjing testimonies has been indexed and subtitled in English.
“Survivor Activism in the Aftermath of Historical Genocides and Contemporary Mass Shootings”
Anna Lee (USC undergraduate, English major, Spanish and TESOL minor)
2019 Beth and Arthur Lev Student Research Fellow
November 5, 2019
“Narratives of ‘Home’: Violence, Spatial Belonging, and Everyday Life for Armenian Genocide Survivors”
Ayşenur Korkmaz (PhD candidate in European Studies, University of Amsterdam)
2019-2020 Robert J. Katz Research Fellow in Genocide Studies
November 19, 2019
About a month before the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, sparking World War II, a desperate Jewish father in Germany penned a letter in broken English to a friend in England, Mrs. Wolf.
“I beg to inform you that we have got a refuse from the Aid Committee in London, owing to our high waiting number for America. … We are very discouraged by this answer and are now forced to get out our children as quick as possible.”
Alfons Lasker, an attorney in Breslau, was on a mission to get his two daughters – Anita and Renate – out of Germany. He did not succeed.