“Time heals all wounds,” they say. It’s difficult to find any other element in our daily lives that possesses the sobering effect that time does. It tames emotions and calms nerves. It allows for much needed reflection and analysis. And, perhaps most importantly, it brings with it resolution and closure. By any account, a century would be more than enough time to heal even the deepest wound, but, surprisingly, time’s impact isn’t always as thorough as we’d expect it to be.

 Madame Xia discusses her family's experiences on December 13, 1937, when Japanese forces entered Nanjing, China.

January 18, 2012: Resistance during the Holocaust is still mostly seen in terms of organized or armed group activities, yet this perspective overlooks individual acts of opposition. Up to now, the availability of sources for analyzing the behavior of German Jews has been limited. Historians used reports originated by the Nazi state and/or written post-war testimonies. In those sources individual acts of opposition barely emerge. However, a closer analysis of the micro level of Nazi society challenges the common image of German Jews as passive victims.

南加州大学与侵华日军南京大屠杀纪念馆合作扩展影像历史档案加利福尼亚洛杉矶 2013年12月13日  南加州大学纳粹屠犹基金会与侵华日军南京大屠杀遇难同胞纪念馆展开历史性的合作，为1937年南京大屠杀最后的幸存者保留证言。新的证言旨在构建起完整的个人生活史，包括他们在南京大屠杀之前和之后的社会文化生活。1937年12月13日，侵华日军占领了当时中国的首都南京，在近两个月时间内杀害了平民与大量解除武装的中国士兵达30万人以上。这些证言将为南京大屠杀历史增添新的视角与知识，并将于2014年2月归入美国南加州大学纳粹屠犹基金会下属的影像历史档案库。采访的程序是根据纳粹屠犹基金会在采集纳粹大屠杀幸存者证言以及采集柬埔寨和卢旺达大屠杀幸存者证言时所积累的经验。新采集的证言也将加入侵华日军南京大屠杀遇难同胞纪念馆已有的档案中。侵华日军南京大屠杀遇难同胞纪念馆与南加州大学纳粹屠犹基金会的合作项目超越了一般层面上对于南京大屠杀见证人的经历梳理、档案整理或是宣传报道，而是试图通过客观和规范的研究，深入到南京大屠杀见证人的生活状况、心理状态、历史意义和现实价值等层面，驳斥日本右翼势力对历史的歪曲和否定，引发学界、政界、商界和社会公众对该群体的关注，揭示创伤性记忆、悲剧文化、历史废墟对于文明进步的意义。

As the curator of the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall, Zhu Chengshan is an influential figure in the study of the Nanjing Massacre. But he is also distinguished as one of the most prominent scholars of Chinese history, museum studies and peace-building.

September 27, 2012: Cambodian genocide survivor Kosal Path, a lecturer in the USC School of International Relations and a USC Shoah Foundation Fellow, discussed his research on social rehabilitation in post-genocide Cambodia.

USC Shoah Foundation and Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall have embarked on a historic effort to preserve the testimonies of the last survivors of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, also known as the Rape of Nanjing.

Summary: Free and open to the public, monthly Institute visits give guests a chance to explore the life stories of survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust and other genocides and to discover how their memories are being used to overcome prejudice, intolerance, and bigotry. Description:

Summary: Free and open to the public, monthly Institute visits give guests a chance to explore the life stories of survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust and other genocides and to discover how their memories are being used to overcome prejudice, intolerance, and bigotry. Description:

 This event has been cancelled. Please contact lrogers@usc.edu or kiahays@usc.edu with any questions.  

As I write this, I am standing alongside 30 of the last 200 survivors of the Nanjing Massacre, which began 76 years ago Friday. Sirens sound around this Chinese city as the last few eyewitnesses of a massacre gather. Starting Dec. 13, 1937, and lasting six weeks, as many as 300,000 civilians were murdered during the atrocities.

USC Doheny Memorial Library (DML), Room 240 How Many Bytes does it Take to Get to the Center? Finding the Human in Digital Humanities

USC School of Cinematic Arts (SCA) Room 106 Awards for the Institute’s annual Student Voices Film Contest will be announced. The evening will include screenings of the winning films as well as a panel discussion with honorees and the distinguished jury.   Independent filmmakers Eric Kabera and Sam Kadi will serve on the Student Voices Film Contest jury for the first time.

In this clip, Madame Chen describes the killing of her family members, and explains how she managed to escape from a Japanese soldier.

Oriana Packer teaches college prep freshman English and honors junior language and composition at Brockton High School in Brockton, Mass. Her junior class completed the IWitness Video Challenge, which asks students to create videos showing how they were inspired by testimony to create positive change in their communities. What attracted you to IWitness? Why did you want to use it in your classroom?

English and composition teacher Oriana Packer, of Brockton High School in Brockton, Mass., assigned her junior students the IWitness Video Challenge. Here, three of them share what it was like to watch testimony for the first time. (In the photo, left to right: Kweku Quansah, Lucia Ugbesia, Alexandra Eugene, Oriana Packer) When did you first learn about the Holocaust?

Damaged videotapes in the Visual History Archive, previously thought to be unfixable, are being restored thanks to new software developed by USC Shoah Foundation technology staff.

Leon Gersten and some of his family escaped the Frystak ghetto in Poland and hid with a Polish family for almost two years. Leon remembers when police officials entered the home of the Polish family looking for Jews and he recalls how much the family sacrificed.

When I tell my fellow USC students that I’m the president of an organization called SFISA, it’s usually safe to assume that 90% of them have no idea what it is. It’s not the most elegant of acronyms and we acknowledge this. Our club’s full name – the Shoah Foundation Institute Student Association – is equally as unwieldy but at least it’s descriptive, and that’s something, right? But even if they’ve heard of our less than stellar name, they still might not know who we are or what we do. So let me take this moment to enlighten you.

Helena Jonas Rosenzweig reflects on how generous her parents were to those in need. She remembers when her father was deported from the Krakow (Cracow) ghetto in Poland to a concentration camp and how his deportation affected her mother.

On the heels of USC Shoah Foundation’s new partnership with the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall to collect and preserve testimony of Nanjing Massacre survivors, the educational platform Facing History and Ourselves signed an agreement to integrate three of those testimonies into its own educational materials.

Irene Klass reflects on the horrible living conditions in the Warsaw ghetto. She remembers her family would sing together in the evening for entertainment since they didn’t have any radio or newspapers available.

USC Shoah Foundation is excited to announce the upcoming launch of the tablet-compatible version of its award-winning educational website IWitness. Educators and students can search, watch and engage with the testimonies in IWitness on their iPads or tablet devices after January 6, 2014.   IWitness activities can also be assigned and worked on with a tablet, although video editing will need to be done on a Flash-enabled device (laptop, desktop, etc).   

Ian McAvoy teaches English and Film Arts at University City High School in San Diego, Calif. He learned about IWitness after visiting the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust with his class. He said the IWitness Video Challenge appealed to him because his students could use the website’s editing tools largely independently, and it would require them to synthesize their diverse learning about the Holocaust (via testimony, the museum trip, Elie Wiesel’s Night, and history classes) while encouraging altruism.

For Alessandro Marazzi Sassoon, last summer’s Problems Without Passports trip to Rwanda was an opportunity to take the study of post-genocide society one step further. Sassoon ’14 is an international relations major at the University of Southern California, concentrating on foreign policy analysis and security studies. After growing up in New York and Paris and completing a study abroad trip to Sweden, Finland and Russia, Sassoon was excited to visit central Africa for the first time.

Anoush Krikorian was interviewed by the filmmaker J. Michael Hagopian over 10 years ago about his experiences as a survivor of the Armenian Genocide. Now, Krikorian’s granddaughter is working to make sure his voice, and the voices of over 400 other survivors, are preserved in one of USC Shoah Foundation’s newest collections.

By the time Lorry Black finishes his dissertation, the music of the Holocaust may very well be brought back to life. Black is finishing his first semester as a doctoral student in sacred music at the USC Thornton School of Music. He was one of USC Shoah Foundation’s summer 2013 research fellows, conducting research in the Visual History Archive for his dissertation about the music of French concentration camps during the Holocaust.