Paulin Ndahayo is quickly proving to be one of the newest and most passionate ambassadors of IWitness in Rwanda. Ndahayo teaches political education and literature at Gashora Girls Academy in the Bugesera district in eastern Rwanda. He attended the first Rwandan IWitness teacher training at Kigali Genocide Memorial Center (KGMC) in November 2013 and, with his colleague Penelope Aryatugumya, will conduct a pilot of his first IWitness lesson at his school this year.

After working as an undergraduate intern at USC Shoah Foundation, Gabby Sharaga is now using testimony in her own classes as a student teacher. Sharaga interned in external relations and education (where she helped develop the IWitness website) at USC Shoah Foundation after conducting a research project using testimony for Genocide and Terrorism, a political science course at USC.

Ellie Ferd has a pretty clear understanding of the Holocaust: “It’s not human,” the 12-year-old said. “It’s not something that should happen.”

One of the first researchers to examine USC Shoah Foundation’s new Rwandan Tutsi Genocide collection is Samantha Lakin, a former Fulbright scholar and master’s candidate at Tufts University.

Dozens of college students conduct research in the Visual History Archive for their thesis projects at the USC Shoah Foundation every year. One student, however, is writing her senior thesis on the Shoah Foundation itself.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

For the next two months, three staff members from Aegis Trust in Rwanda are getting in-depth training in indexing genocide survivor testimony right here at the USC Shoah Foundation.

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.

Intern Fiona Guo was able to utilize her Chinese heritage and interest in intercultural communication while working on the new Nanjing Massacre testimony collection at USC Shoah Foundation.

The stories of musicians during the Holocaust guided Syuzanna Petrosyan and Greg Irwin through the Student Voices Short Film Contest, and the result is their winning film Play for Your Life.Petrosyan, a master’s candidate in public diplomacy, and Irwin, a senior international relations major, are both interns at the USC Shoah Foundation and members of its student organization, SFISA.

Shirin Raban was just beginning work on her thesis, a short film about Persians’ observations of Passover in Los Angeles, when she decided to take on the Student Voices Short Film Contest.

Sara Greenberg was so moved by her grandparents’ stories of survival and resilience during the Holocaust that she made a film to honor their history and inspire others to act out against genocide.

Rebecca Baugh tells the heart-wrenching story of Noemi  Ban in her entry to the Student Voices Short Film Contest.In her film, Baugh, a junior international relations global business major, includes historical footage and film clips to supplement Ban’s retelling of how she, as a teenager, took care of her younger siblings in the ghetto and finally watched her family disappear into the gas chamber.“I loved that [the USC Shoah Foundation] takes these huge historical events that we study and made them personal,” Baugh said.

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.

As an IWitness regional consultant, Brandon Barr sees firsthand the impact testimony can have on both students and teachers.Barr teaches eighth grade reading and writing at Nightingale Elementary in Chicago, where he uses IWitness, USC Shoah Foundation’s educational website, to teach about the Holocaust. As an IWitness regional consultant, he is responsible for leading IWitness teacher training programs and introducing IWitness to schools in his area.

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.

At 88 years old, Holocaust survivor Sonia Warshawski still has a lot left to teach us.That’s why her granddaughter, film producer/director Leah Warshawski, has begun shooting a documentary called Big Sonia to share the tenacious octogenarian’s incredible life story with the next generation.

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.

Over 15 years after he worked as assistant international production coordinator at the Shoah Foundation, Joshua Belkind still regards the experience as one that influenced where he is today.Belkind began interning as an assistant videographer at the Shoah Foundation when he was an undergraduate film major at the University of Southern California around 1995. Over the summer, he said, he recorded 10 interviews a week. He ended up doing over 100 interviews.

Aegis Trust’s Paul Rukesha helped lead the USC Shoah Foundation mission to Rwanda last week, and reports that the mission was, a very meaningful and productive visit for all involved.

President Barack Obama recently appointed Aviva Sufian as the first Special Envoy for United States Holocaust Survivor Services. Sufian is the director of regional operations in the Administration for Community Living (ACL) in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. She previously served in the U.S. Social Security Administration, where she worked on a variety of issues related to both aging and disability, and the New York City Department for the Aging.

After traveling to Rwanda on last summer’s problems Without Passports course, Rebecca Homan is one of the newest interns at the USC Shoah Foundation.

As the president of USC’s STAND chapter, the student anti-genocide coalition, Francesca Bessey is passionate about fighting against genocide. And she wants other students to be as well.

Andrea Szönyi is well aware of the challenges she faces introducing testimony to educators and students in Hungary, but she’s determined to overcome them.