What started out as a curious journey across the hall at Leavey Library turned into one of Marina Kay’s most passionate endeavors at USC.Kay, currently a senior international relations major, was working on USC’s Interlibrary Loan & Document Delivery team at Leavey Library in summer 2014 when she became curious about one particular office that she always passed by in the library – USC Shoah Foundation. She had always been interested in learning about the Holocaust, so one day she decided to go inside, and asked if she could intern or volunteer.

Charlotte Masters is a junior at Sidwell Friends in Washington DC. In 2015 she traveled to Poland as a junior intern for the Auschwitz: Past is Present program. After the trip she created the Survivors Speakers Bureau, to bring survivor’s voices into schools in the greater DC area. Charlotte continues as a junior intern with USC Shoah Foundation mentoring the younger students.

In January 2015, I had the incredible opportunity to travel to Poland with other students from across the country for USC Shoah Foundation’s and Discovery Education’s Auschwitz: Past is Present program. We toured various sites in Warsaw and Krakow, Poland, with teachers and our friend Paula Lebovics, a survivor of the Holocaust. Each point in the trip was remarkable and extremely inspiring. However, the visit to the Auschwitz-Birkeanu Memorial Museum impacted me the most.

A graduate of USC Shoah Foundation’s teacher training programs in Hungary is constructing and pilot-testing the first-ever original Hungarian-language IWitness activity.

Yehudah talks about several painters who were hired to create artwork as reports for the Germans. Many of these painters created illegal paintings that have survived, showing the terrible atrocities of the Holocaust and were sent to a camp as prisoners for their punishment.

Edith Lowy describes how her family hid during the Holocaust and after a series of event, the family decided to voluntarily march into the nearby labor camp to avoid the consequences of being caught by the Nazis.