Interviewing Holocaust survivors for the Shoah Foundation in the 1990s was a “second film school” for filmmaker Rafael Lewandowski, and an experience he still draws on today.

Though it’s most known as the city that was home to the Auschwitz concentration camp, the Polish city of Oświęcim has a history of its own as a small industrial center with a thriving Jewish population.

Sonia Klein (née Joskowicz) was born on June 16, 1925 in Warsaw, Poland. Her parents Itzack and Jospa Joskowicz, ran a family business selling fruit, vegetables, wood, and coal. Sonia was the oldest of three children; she had a sister and a brother. Before the war, she attended a public school and aspired to be a teacher.

Simone Lagrange (nee Kadousche) was born on October 23, 1930 in Saint-Fons, France, near Lyon. Originally from Morocco, her parents Simon Kadousche andRachel came to France in the 1920s.

Moshe Shamir (name at birth Schmucker) was born in an Orthodox Jewish family on April 17, 1922 in Cernauti, Romania (today Chernivtsi, Ukraine). His father,Avraham, was a teacher in a Hebrew school. He died when Moshe was only five years old. Moshe’s mother, Rifka, raised him and his older brother, Menachem,on her own. Moshe attended a four-grade Yiddish school, was a member of the Gordonia Zionist youth movement, and sang in the Jewish Choral Temple choir. Hestarted apprenticeship in a haberdashery store at the age of twelve.

Amy Marczewski Carnes, Ph.D. completed her doctorate at UCLA in French and Francophone Studies in 2007.  During graduate studies, she taught French language, literature, film, and culture courses in both the U.S. and in France.  Her dissertation, entitled Remembering Together:  Francophone African Literature’s Re-Imagining of the Rwandan Genocide, analyzes the strategies that literature adopts for memorializing genocide and considers new models of commemoration that may cultivate reconciliation in post-conflict society.

The word journey comes to the English language from the Old French jornee, meaning a day, or, by extension, a day’s labor or travel.  This word, which we normally associate with something pleasant, takes on a different meaning when placed in conversation with the word Holocaust.  This was the challenge placed in front of me by colleagues at UNESCO, when they requested that the USC Shoah Foundation prepare an exhibition for International Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27 – the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp.

Ben Sonnenschein reflects on the construction of Auschwitz concentration camp in his hometown of Oswiecim, Poland. Sonnenschein also explains he was forced by the Germans to carry lumber and complete other carpentry work during the building of the camp in the beginning of 1940.

Rena Finder survived the Holocaust by working in Oscar Schindler’s factory. Finder is a featured speaker for the Holocaust Memorial Ceremony at the United Nations on January 27, the International Day of Commemoration in memory of the victims of the Holocaust.