Esther Fiszman immigrated to Australia after the Holocaust and found the people she met there to be kind, helpful and accepting. There were very few Jewish people in her town but she never experienced any anti-Semitism there.

USC Shoah Foundation Australia Regional Consultant Sarah Warby will speak about the power of teaching with testimony at Knox Grammar School’s Practicing Positive Education conference in Sydney, Aug. 28-29.

Fay Aronowicz talks about the Poligon Massacre in Lithuania in October 1941, in which 8,000 Jews were murdered. A Lithuanian police officer allowed her to leave the site of the impending massacre, but her mother had to stay behind.

The four undergraduates working with USC Shoah Foundation during the summer Research in Industrial Projects for Students (RIPS) program at UCLA presented their new method for achieving more relevant search results in the Visual History Archive to staff on Wednesday.

Testimony clip of Norma Dimitry was subtitled into Czech, for a presentation in Czech Republic on teaching about the refugee crisis with testimony.

I invite you to view a clip of Norma Dimitry’s testimony. The clip is subtitled into Czech, just in case some of my fellow Czechs were interested in learning more about the last time our country provided at least a safe transit route if not a safe haven to a mass of people.

The President of the Republic went on record to tell the prospective immigrants “nobody invited you here!” Refugees escaping from a murderous regime are regarded as agents of that very regime. Concerned citizens who never saw a refugee discuss them with great fear: refugees will take our jobs, kill our wives, rape our daughters. “We may take a few of those who can prove they are and always were Christians,” some interior ministry clerk declared.

When watching a testimony in the Visual History Archive, Liliane Weissberg pays close attention to the words the survivor is saying, and, just as importantly, to the silences in between those words.

Harold Brand describes how his family was one of the last to be deported to the Tarnów  ghetto in Poland. He continues to describe the last time he saw his parents and sister.

For the second year in a row, testimony from the Visual History Archive is inspiring teenagers to illustrate true scenes of the violation of human rights during the Stalin totalitarian regime and Nazi persecution of Jews in Ukraine.

Aaron Rosenfeld describes how he and others survived the attacks on Kyiv, Ukraine, by sharing food and resources with local farmers.

Nechama Ariel describes the different schools for Jewish children and Christian children in her town in Poland before the war. She explains the different subjects that were taught in each school.

With the first day of school already behind many students and teachers, USC Shoah Foundation is debuting several new educational materials that can help educators teach about genocide, civil rights, tolerance and other topics.

Alex Biniaz-Harris is a recent USC graduate, with Bachelor degrees in business and music. Alex has worked for USC Shoah Foundation for three years, as a communications and social media marketing intern. His grandmother, Celina Biniaz, and her parents Phyllis and Irwin Karp are survivors of Schindler’s List. Both Celina and Phyllis’s testimonies are preserved in the Visual History Archive.

USC Shoah Foundation hosted a special event titled The Digital Future of Holocaust Memory and Education in Aspen, Colorado, yesterday, to introduce new supporters to the work of the Institute.

Jona Goldrich discusses the roots of his charitable personality and giving. Growing up in Lviv, Poland, his family was considered well-off because they were able to put food on the table. His family would invite neighbors to eat dinner at their house on Saturday nights as tradition.

Tracy Sockalosky left Poland inspired by new ways she can incorporate testimony and the lessons she learned from "Auschwitz: The Past is Present" (APIP) into her courses at Wilson Middle School in Natick, Mass.

Indexing USC Shoah Foundation’s new testimony collection from Jewish Family and Children’s Services (JFCS) of San Francisco was an ideal continuation of the work Nancy Saul has done for much of her career. Saul spent 10 years as the reference and information services librarian at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles and also ran the center’s “Ask a Survivor” outreach program, so she was no stranger to testimony when she began working on the JFCS collection at USC Shoah Foundation in January 2014.

Melinda Goldrich continued her family’s tradition of philanthropy by hosting a special event to introduce a new audience in Aspen, Colo., last night to the work of USC Shoah Foundation.

Zach Albert’s journey to USC Shoah Foundation to work as an indexer on the Jewish Family and Children’s Services (JFCS) of San Francisco Holocaust testimony collection began when he was 12 years old and preparing for his bar mitzvah.Albert was volunteering at the Dallas Holocaust Museum and had become totally captivated by the survivors he met there – they were like his surrogate grandparents, he said. When it came time for him to decide on a community service project for his bar mitzvah, he noticed that the museum was lacking something important: a Torah scroll.

While her fellow indexers focused on mainly English-language testimonies in USC Shoah Foundation’s new collection from Jewish Family and Children’s Services (JFCS) of San Francisco, Svetlana Ushakova indexed testimonies of Holocaust survivors from her native Russia – who at times felt like her own friends.With a PhD in Russian History from Novosibirsk University, Ushakova joined the JFCS collection with expertise in pre-war Soviet history, though she had not worked very closely with oral history testimonies before.

When Rob Hadley joined 10 other teachers for the IWitness Teaching Fellowship in July, it was far from his first time creating testimony-based lessons and activities.

By spending a year in Los Angeles as USC Shoah Foundation’s Austrian Holocaust Memorial Service intern, Florian Köppl is fulfilling a lifelong dream.Köppl is the 12th young man from Austria to work at USC Shoah Foundation as an alternative to his compulsory military service back home. The Austrian Holocaust Memorial Service, founded by Andreas Maislinger, places accepted applicants at Holocaust memorial institutions around the world, where they live and work for one year.

Professor and Holocaust scholar Kenneth Waltzer has no trouble coming up with topics to research in the Visual History Archive.There’s his current study of the rescue of the children and youths at Buchenwald, or his investigation of the brick mason school in Auschwitz. Or there’s the project he just started a few weeks ago researching how many of the boys liberated from Buchenwald went on to serve in the Palmuch underground army in Israel. No matter what, he says, “if you know the material and you can get into it, you can find all kinds of ways to research in the testimonies.”

Thursday’s event to celebrate the completion of indexing the Institute’s new collection from Jewish Family and Children’s Services (JFCS) of San Francisco was the culmination of not just a year and a half, but eight years of work on the collection for indexer Debbie Kahn.

One of the first steps in the UK’s National Holocaust Centre and Museum’s partnership with USC Shoah Foundation was for James Griffiths to participate in the IWitness Teaching Fellowship this summer.

It wasn’t until she wrote her book A Guest at the Shooter’s Banquet, available now, that Rita Gabis learned the truth about her family’s complicated past.

The memorial service for Yevnige Salibian, one of the last remaining survivors of the 1915 Armenian Genocide, was held today in Mission HIlls, Calif. Salibian died August 29, 2015, at 101 years old.A force of nature well into her hundreds, Salibian gave testimony about her childhood experiences to USC Shoah Foundation in 2014.