While protests rage in Ukraine, many Ukrainian teachers are committed to introducing new human rights educational materials to their classrooms. Olha Pedan Slyepukhina has taught middle- and high school history and social studies for 32 years in Ukraine. She was first introduced to the Shoah Foundation in 2007, participating in a teaching seminar called “Encountering Memory” about the film Spell Your Name, which was produced by the Shoah Foundation.

High school vice principal Tetyana Kozhevnikova is eager to share with teachers and students all over Ukraine what she learned at the November 2013 teacher training workshop in Kyiv on the use of a new multimedia teacher’s guide titled Where do Human Rights Begin: History and Contemporary Approaches.

He just graduated from high school last year, but Manuel Müller has already begun his first full-time job as USC Shoah Foundation’s 2014 Austrian Holocaust Memorial Service intern.

Sarah Miller gave testimony to the USC Shoah Foundation in 1997 about her family’s experiences hiding in France and Switzerland during the Holocaust – but she wasn’t finished telling her story just yet.

Peter Berczi began working as a librarian at Budapest's Central European University in 2009 –the same year that CEU became a Visual History Archive Access site. But more and more, he says, he thinks this coincidence was meant to be. Berczi helps professors at CEU find testimonies to use in their courses and conducts sessions to teach their students how to use the archive. He also conducts Visual History Archive trainings for local secondary educators as part of the Teaching with Testimony in the 21st Century professional development program.

Filmmaker Sam Kadi says he’ll be looking for honest, impactful storytelling when he helps judge the entries for this year’s Student Voices Short Film Contest. Kadi – an “engineer by trade, filmmaker by choice,” he says – came to the United States from Syria in his ‘20s and began making short films and documentaries after a stint as a theatrical actor, writer, and director. He graduated from the Motion Picture Institute of Michigan in 2007 and wrote and directed several narrative and documentary films including the award-winning short film Raised Alone in 2009.

Twelve years after being part of the team that designed the interface of the Visual History Archive, Ella Belzberg has made a detailed examination of the process her dissertation at the UC Santa Barbara Gevirtz Graduate School of Education.

Martin Šmok was making a documentary film in the summer of 1994 about the Jewish underground movement in Slovakia during World War II when he realized that the key witnesses he needed to interview all lived far away from his home in the Czech Republic. While looking for help, he came across the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, then just beginning its quest to interview 50,000 Holocaust survivors and witnesses around the world. Šmok was hired as an interviewer.

Monika Koszyńska says she feels privileged to be USC Shoah Foundation’s international liaison in Poland, but is also acutely aware of the magnitude of work to be done.Koszyńska joined the USC Shoah Foundation staff as its international liaison in Poland in 2002, though she had been familiar with Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation since the mid-1990s, when she was a teacher at a primary school.

Rwandan filmmaker Eric Kabera will travel from Hillywood (Rwanda’s burgeoning film industry named after the country’s famously hilly landscape) to Hollywood to help judge this year’s Student Voices Short Film Contest.