Marina Kay is a senior International Relations major with an emphasis on the Middle East at USC. Marina interns with the  communications department and is a member of the USC Shoah Foundation Student Association, DEFY. She is also currently a research assistant to the Director of the School of International Relations. 

In commemoration of the Armenian Genocide Centennial, the USC Shoah Foundation will be co-sponsoring "Sharing Our Stories: Voices of Survivors." The event will bring together a panel of speakers representing the Holocaust and the Armenian, Bosnian, Cambodian, and Rwandan genocides. The speakers will share their personal experiences, and their paths toward healing, forgiveness, and re-establishing livelihoods in Los Angeles.

Scott Spencer was flying from Philadelphia to Los Angeles last May to meet up with his wife, who had just gotten a new job as the cantor of University Synagogue in Brentwood, when he struck up a conversation with the young girl sitting next to him.He asked her why she was traveling to Los Angeles. To his surprise, she said she was going to meet President Obama and present a documentary she had made for school.

USC Shoah Foundation recently hosted a group of staff from Aegis Trust in Kigali, Rwanda, who came to participate in an onsite training on various aspects of archiving audiovisual testimonies.

Prof. Richard Hovannisian on the life and testimony of Alice Muggerditchian Shipley. This is the third testimony in the Armenian Genocide Testimony series.

You never know what you are going to discover in the Visual History Archive. Each one of the 53,000 testimonies in the Archive tells a different story of life before, during and after the individual’s experience with genocide.

Los Angeles, April 1, 2015 – To commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide in April, USC Shoah Foundation — The Institute for Visual History and Education will debut a month-long series of testimony clips from survivors and witnesses of the 20th century’s first genocide.One clip a day are being released on the Institute’s website at sfi.usc.edu through the last day of April, which is Genocide Awareness and Prevention Month. Included on the month-long timeline will be the April 24 anniversary of the Armenian Genocide’s onset.

Educators in Hungary were busy last weekend. USC Shoah Foundation hosted three of its programs for teachers: an ITeach seminar, an IWalk through the Budapest Jewish district, and the first-ever Hungarian IWitness Educator workshop.

Prof. Richard Hovannisian describes the life of Armenian Genocide survivor Ashrag Dickranian. This is the fourth testimony in the Armenian Genocide Testimony clip series.

After a career spent producing live events for television, working on Auschwitz: The Past is Present allowed Leslie Wilson to return to her early passion for history in what she calls a life-changing experience.

Prof. Richard Hovannisian describes the life of Armenian Genocide survivor Elsie Hagopian Taft. This is the fifth testimony in the Armenian Genocide Testimony clip series.  

Three IWitness educators have authored an article about IWitness for the National Council for the Social Studies’ journal Social Education.

Over the last few days I’ve overheard my grandmother and father talk endlessly about Celia Tiano, an Auschwitz survivor from Salonika, Greece, their next-door neighbor on 7th Avenue -- a quiet block in the Hyde Park area of L.A., during the 1950s and 60s. After more than 40 years, my family has reconnected with Celia -- through testimony. We were able to make this connection because of a film project I had been working on for the Student Voices Short Film Contest.

Over the last several years, I’ve had the distinct privilege to work with the recorded materials collected by the late Dr. J Michael Hagopian. A survivor of the Armenian Genocide himself, Michael had the foresight to capture the voices of those who witnessed the atrocities first hand.  Later this month, the USC Shoah Foundation will make a group of 60 of these interviews available through the Visual History Archive, ensuring that these recollections will be preserved in perpetuity, for future generations.  Michael would have certainly been proud to witness this accomplishment.

After the disastrous Balkan wars of 1912-13, the Turks lost most of their European possessions. To dilute the Armenian presence and create a homogenous Turkish and Muslim population that would unequivocally support the Turkish state, the Young Turks decided on a policy of resettling Muslim refugees from the Balkan wars in Armenian areas and deporting the indigenous population.  These early measures led to the impoverishment and death of thousands; then came the First World War with Turkey taking the side of Germany against Russia and its allies.

The noted Armenian hero General Antranig Ozanian, was born on February 25, 1865, and died on August 31, 1927. He spent the final years of his life living quietly with his wife in Fresno, California. General Antranig was the most well-known of Armenian freedom fighters in the twentieth century, and his exploits are remembered by Armenians throughout the world. General Antranig is buried today at the Yerablur cemetery in Yerevan, Armenia.

Johanna Söderholm has been in high demand since she returned from Auschwitz: The Past is Present.

In order to commemorate the genocides of the 20th century, Tigranna Zakaryan wants to start where many survivors ended up: Los Angeles.

Historians continue to debate the extent of German responsibility for the Armenian Genocide in 1915. The Ottoman Empire was an ally of Germany during WWI (1914- 1918). During the war, Germany was blamed for the Armenian Genocide. Historian Arnold Toynbee in his widely read pamphlet Armenian Atrocities published in 1915 “indicted” Germany for what he called a “shameful and terrible page of modern history” in Armenia.

Sam Kadorian was born in 1907 in Hussenig, a small village in the province of Kharpert, in the eastern plains of Anatolia. He survived the Genocide in 1915 at the age of 8 when the Turkish gendarmes grabbed all the young boys of the village ages 5 to 10 and threw them into a pile on the sandy beach of the shores of the Euphrates River and starting jabbing them with their swords and bayonets. Fortunately, they only nipped his cheek and his grandmother later found him and nursed him back to health.

Wolf Gruner, director of USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research, will spend two months in residence at the Berlin-Brandenburg Center for Jewish Studies this summer researching Jewish resistance against the Nazis.

Watch Shony Braun’s full testimony from the Visual History Archive as part of Comcast’s Days of Remembrance: PastFORWARD broadcast April 15-June 1, 2015.In the forests of Romania in 1934, four-year-old Shony Braun was out for a walk with his babysitter when he wandered off and became lost. A gypsy woman, hearing his cries and not knowing who he was or where he belonged, took him to the gypsy camp for safety. Upon their arrival, Shony’s attention was utterly transfixed by something: a violin. It was the most beautiful sound he had ever heard.

One Day in Auschwitz is an hour-long documentary produced by USC Shoah Foundation and originally broadcast on Discovery on Jan. 27, 2015. It follows Holocaust survivor Kitty Hart-Moxon as she returns to Auschwitz-Birkenau with two high school students.

Shony Braun a violnist, recalls being selected to play music for the SS officers at Dachau. He believes that he would’ve been killed if not for his ability to play music. 

Roman Ferber explains why it is so important for him and other Holocaust survivors to speak about their experiences.

Alice Muggerditchian Shipley was 11 years old when in autumn of 1914 Turkey entered the war alongside Germany against the Allied Powers, and the atrocities against Armenians began. The Ottoman government took advantage of the war years to realize its premeditated and systematically implemented annihilation of the Armenian population. In this short clip, Alice describes the horrors of the first few months before her family was forced to take the route of deportation out of Harpout (Kharbert).

Born into an affluent German Jewish family, Henry Morgenthau, Sr. was raised in New York, where he attended school and received his training as an attorney at Columbia. An early supporter of Woodrow Wilson, Morgenthau was tapped by the then newly-elected president to become the United States Ambassador for the Ottoman Empire.

         Trzy tygodnie temu USC Shoah Foundation zorganizowała w Polsce obchody 70. rocznicy wyzwolenia Nazistowskiego obozu Auschwitz. A w ubiegłym tygodniu pracownicy Muzeum Historii Żydów Polskich POLIN odwiedzili nas.

Dr. Ugur Üngör began his lecture yesterday at The Forum in USC’s Tutor Campus Center by asking a question that has plagued genocide researchers for generations.