In some ways, the one minute we spend with Elsie Hagopian Taft – 56 seconds, to be precise – is a wrenching primer on the Armenian Genocide. It is a poignant and powerful evocation of an innermost ring of Dante’s inferno, and a courageous explanation of why the Armenian Genocide matters today.

Michael Hagopian conducted almost all of the interviews in the Armenian Genocide Testimony collection.  After he died in December 2010, the Armenian Film Foundation received a request to interview Almas Boghosian, in Whitinsville, Massachusetts. Her granddaughter Taline had interviewed her in 2000, but her family wanted Almas to be interviewed again for this collection. I called a cameraman I knew from my previous work with the BBC and we went to Almas’ house, and met Almas’ grandson Bruce Boghosian and his wife, Laura.  

Most students give their teachers gifts of coffee mugs, chocolate, or flowers. This year, Eden Strunk’s students pooled their resources and found her a Cambodian genocide survivor to speak to the class.Strunk had inspired them to care about human rights and genocide just as she inspired Ruth Hernandez, a ninth grader at Esperanza Charter Academy in Philadelphia who won USC Shoah Foundation’s first-ever IWitness Video Challenge last year. Strunk had assigned the challenge to her “advisory” class – a course devoted to getting students more engaged in their school and community.

ENS Lyon is mounting a major exhibition looking at the plight of liberated survivors returning to France at the end of World War II.

Thousands of people came to Times Square on Sunday to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, and to demand the U.S. government recognize the slaughter of 1.5 million people as genocide. In a speech at the event, USC Shoah Foundation Executive Director Stephen Smith said that the world must stand together speak for those who are not here to speak for themselves.

100 Days to Inspire Respect In every genocide, in spite of the horror of human killing and the danger that poses, there are remarkable people that come to the fore.  Armin T. Wegner was in the German Sanitary Corps and was posted to Eastern Turkey during WWI.  There he was witness to the genocide of the Armenian people. Seeing the devastating consequences of the deportations he documented the genocide in photographs, keeping meticulous notes at great personal risk.

USC’s Human Rights and Genocide Awareness Week concluded last night with a moving discussion of women’s experiences during and after genocide, featuring survivors of the Guatemalan, Armenian and Rwandan Genocides.

USC Shoah Foundation and Discovery Education will host an interactive virtual experience for middle- and high-school students worldwide to provide a deeper understanding of the Holocaust.

One night last week, Megan Maybray was panicking.A Holocaust survivor named Rita Ross was visiting her school, Kennett Middle School near Philadelphia, the next day, but Maybray was having trouble teaching her ESL students about the Holocaust. Her students are new arrivals to the United States and most know little English. Maybray had never really taught the Holocaust before and could tell that her previous attempt to introduce them to the basics had not had much of an impact.

After an ITeach workshop April 15 at the Brno branch of the Jewish Museum of Prague’s Educational Center, a brand-new IWalk in Brno is now available online.

Watch Alice Herz Sommer’s full testimony from the Visual History Archive as part of Comcast’s Days of Remembrance: PastFORWARD broadcast April 15-June 1, 2015.Perhaps no musical Holocaust survivor is more well-known and beloved than Alice Herz Sommer.

Three Holocaust survivors describe incredible stories of how music quite literally saved their lives in the Days of Remembrance film Music Saved My Life.

(Pickhan, left, and Bothe)USC Shoah Foundation has chosen its 2015 Teaching Fellows: Gertrud Pickhan and Alina Bothe, who will develop a seminar course as well as a public exhibition on the deportation of Polish Jews from Berlin at Freie Universität.Teaching Fellows receive a $2,000 stipend and $500 for course materials, and work with USC Shoah Foundation staff to develop their course. Their syllabi are published on the USC Shoah Foundation website, and fellows are expected to give a public presentation of their course at the end of the fellowship period.

Merinda Davis was so inspired by Roman Kent's message of peace that she developed a lesson that has inspired her students to live by his words, and feels that her teaching has been changed forever.

Edith Umugiraneza, staff member of USC Shoah Foundation was born in Rwanda and survived the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi, but lost most of her family including mother, oldest brother, cousins, nieces, grandparents and uncles. After the Genocide Edith moved to Canada where she finished high school, college and university. In 2004, she moved to Los Angeles where she now lives with her husband and two beautiful daughters. Edith gave her testimony to USC Shoah Foundation and continues to speak about her experience around the Greater Los Angeles area.

I participated in an event in April called Survivor Voices. We were six panelists from Bosnia, Rwanda, Cambodia, two Holocaust survivors and an Armenian-American priest.

Wendy Lower has used the Visual History Archive to uncover how women contributed to the Nazi Party and helped perpetrate the crimes of the Holocaust.

Agahozo Shalom Youth Village held its annual Stand Up & Be Counted event May 4 in New York City, and awarded Stephen D. Smith and James M. Smith its Anne Heyman Spirit Award for their service and generosity.

Jona Goldrich’s family evaded roundups deportation by hiding in an attic. Jona describes how he and his young brother escaped Nazi occupied Poland after his father decided it was no longer safe for his sons to remain in the country.

Elizabeth Vitanza teaches her students a multitude of skills, including French, video editing and project management, when she does her IWitness unit each year.

Gertrude Englander describes the liberation of Mauthausen concentration camp in May 1945.

Just two weeks ago, USC Shoah Foundation launched its Armenian Genocide Collection in the Visual History Archive; now, 12 of those initial 60 testimonies are already available for students and educators to view in IWitness.

Get a behind-the-scenes look at how two USC students composed a piano piece inspired by Holocaust survivor testimony in the new documentary Melodies of Auschwitz.

Wolf Deane plays the song composed and sang by Jews in the Lodz ghetto in Poland. This testimony clip and melody is featured in the short film Melodies of Auschwitz.   

(Alex Biniaz-Harris, left, and Ambrose Soehn)The composers behind the three-movement piano piece featured in the documentary Melodies of Auschwitz, now playing on Comcast Xfinity’s Days of Remembrance: PastFORWARD broadcast, reunited for a screening and concert at USC’s Brain and Creativity Institute this week and spoke candidly about their journey from page to performance.

Edith Umugiraneza was born and raised in Rwanda and survived the 1994 Rwandan Tutsi Genocide but lost most of her family including her mother. Edith wrote this poem not only as an ode to her mother but as a promise to continue her mother's work of helping others.

As part of USC Shoah Foundation’s Preserving the Legacy initiative, 281 testimonies from Holocaust Museum Houston are currently being indexed for integration into the Visual History Archive.

The second annual Greenberg Research Fellowship has been awarded to Julia Werner, a PhD candidate in history at Humboldt University, Berlin, who will combine testimony with her study of photography of occupied Poland during World War II.

USC Shoah Foundation is currently in the second year of Days of Remembrance: PastFORWARD, a five-year partnership with Comcast to provide USC Shoah Foundation content to Comcast Xfinity customers On Demand, through the Xfinity TV Go app and online, in conjunction with the U.S. National Days of Remembrance, a commemoration of the Holocaust held every spring.