Holocaust survivor Samuel Geller recalls a more sober celebration than usual on Purim of 1933 in Chemnitz, Germany, with a classmate dressing up as Hitler to play Haman, Purim’s villain.
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Jola Gelb is a Jewish Holocaust survivor who was imprisoned in the Metajna Concentration camp in Slana/Pag in today’s Croatia. More than 3,500 Jews, Roma and Serbs were held at Slana in the summer of 1941, and 1,000 were killed at a complex of camps run by the Ustasha regime. Researchers are using Jola’s testimony to help document and preserve the sites of persecution in Slana.
Watch and learn more about the relaunch of the Visual History Archive.
Yiddish Poet and Holocaust survivor Rikva Basman Ben-Hayim died March 22, 2023, at 98. In her March 1996 testimony, Holocaust survivor Adela Bay, who was in Kaiserwald concentration camp with Rivka, remembers the opening lines of Rivka's poem reflecting on the humanity that still remains through a person's eyes, despite the inhumanity of a shaved head and wearing a prison uniform.
Stephen Kalmar, an activist who fled Austria in the 1930’s and emigrated to Mexico with his wife in 1940.
Heinz Geggel was Secretary of the Freies Deutschland anti-Nazi group in Cuba during World War Two.
In this clip from his 2022 testimony, Gerald Szames recalls his personal encounter with antisemitism from a fellow college student. Recorded in the Ceci Chan and Lila Sorkin Memory Studio at the USC Shoah Foundation Institute's global headquarters on the USC campus in Los Angeles, California.