At 12 years old, Anna Krisztina Berecz first learned about the Holocaust from Miklos Nyiszli’s book Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account.  The experience was so haunting that she decided to forget it as quickly as possible.

With the publication of her book Une vie contre une autre (One Life Against Another) historian Sonia Combe has become one of the first French scholars to extensively use the Visual History Archive in academic research – and she hopes many other researchers will follow in her footsteps.

For many educators in the greater Los Angeles area, Matthew Friedman is their first introduction to teaching the Holocaust.

At the brand-new POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, Zofia Mioduszewska has perhaps one of the most rewarding jobs: helping to educate the museum’s youngest visitors about the Holocaust and Jewish life in Poland.

Keith Meador doesn’t mind that his students say they’d rather watch videos in class than listen to him lecture.That’s because the videos they are referring to are USC Shoah Foundation testimonies.

From her master’s thesis to the Holocaust workshops she leads for students in England, the Visual History Archive has always been an important part of Jennifer Craig-Norton’s work.

Davis Wamonhi’s own students at Kagarama Secondary School in Kigali, Rwanda, inspired him to use IWitness in his classroom.Wamonhi’s history students were invited to attend an IWitness pilot at Gisozi Genocide Memorial, where they were introduced to learning history through video testimonies through USC Shoah Foundation’s interactive educational website.

When Christa Calkins travels to Poland on USC Shoah Foundation and Discovery Education’s Auschwitz: The Past is Present professional development program this January, her students back home will be right there with her –at least virtually.

When Keith Stringfellow was about 12, he was reading a book about World War II when his great uncle, a World War II veteran, began telling him about his experiences at Normandy after D-Day. Stringfellow asked him what affected him most during the war, and he answered simply, “Dachau.”

After experiencing intolerance throughout her life, Emily Bengels has strived to model kindness and acceptance for her students at Readington Middle School in New Jersey. Participating in USC Shoah Foundation and Discovery Education’s professional development program Auschwitz: The Past is Present will, she hopes, guide her teaching of the Holocaust and inspire her students to stand up for humanity.

Living and working in the UNESCO World Heritage city of Trebic, Czech Republic, Daniela Vitaskova often teaches history by taking her students to historical sites. As one of 25 teachers chosen to travel to Poland to attend the Auschwitz: The Past is Present professional development program in January, Vitaskova will prepare herself to take her students to Auschwitz later next year.

Laura Pritchard Dobrin was inspired to create the first-ever teacher-authored activity in IWitness by one of her own favorite educators – and in the process, produced a lesson that teaches students about not just the Holocaust, but also a fascinating poet named Lotte Kramer.

Twenty years after her family fled the Rwandan genocide, Rose Twagiramariya has returned to Rwanda to work for USC Shoah Foundation.Twagiramariya was born in Rwanda and left with her family in July 1994 during the genocide, when she was six years old. The family lived in a refugee camp in the Congo, Senegal, and Maryland before settling in Louisville, Kent., in 1999.

Ukraine has recently made headlines for its ongoing conflict with Russia, but Anna Lenchovska has helped bring human rights educational resources to the country for nearly 10 years as USC Shoah Foundation’s Ukrainian consultant.

In each testimony in the Visual History Archive, survivors have the opportunity to show photographs and family artifacts. Though this segment usually comes as a footnote of sorts at the end of each testimony, after the survivor has finished telling his or her story, it’s here that Linda Kim, a recipient of USC Shoah Foundation’s 2014 Teaching Fellowship, will focus her research this summer.

Jared McBride, the first-ever Margee and Douglas Greenberg Research Fellow at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research, says testimony isn’t just an important aspect of his upcoming book manuscript. It can help prove that the controversial history he studies even happened.

University of Southern California digital journalism and history major Christina Schoellkopf will spend the summer conducting research for her senior thesis in USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive as a 2014 research fellow.

Ruth Pearl is best known as the mother of late American journalist Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal’s South Asia Bureau Chief, who was kidnapped and murdered in Pakistan by terrorists in 2002. But it is her own life story that is preserved as part of USC Shoah Foundation’s new collection of testimonies from North Africa and the Middle East.

When students learn about the Holocaust for the first time by watching testimony from the USC Shoah Foundation, Inna Gogina knows exactly how they feel. She, too, didn’t know about the Holocaust – until she began working for the USC Shoah Foundation.

When Kim Simon began working at the Shoah Foundation to help coordinate efforts to collect testimonies in 1994, she understood that the voices of those who lived through some of history’s darkest times needed to be heard by as many people as possible. “Survivors and witnesses to the Holocaust and other genocides and crimes against humanity have an irreplaceable perspective to add to our understanding of the world and its conflicts, wherever they occur,” Simon explained.

For USC Shoah Foundation’s education department, led by director Kori Street, PhD, being involved in the Auschwitz: The Past is Present program is a historic opportunity to demonstrate USC Shoah Foundation’s commitment to sharing and teaching survivors’ stories.USC Shoah Foundation is partnering with Discovery Communications on the education component of Auschwitz: The Past is Present, a global communications and education program that will support the official observance of the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz on January 27, 2015.

Lesly Culp, is USC Shoah Foundation’s Director of Education. In her role, she leads the educational strategic plan to make audiovisual testimonies and interactive biographies of survivors and witnesses of genocide and mass atrocity accessible to educators and students worldwide.