Like many educators who use Echoes and Reflections to teach about the Holocaust, Koty Zelinka Cole first heard about the program through a colleague. Now, she is the one recommending it to other educators who are looking for resources to help them teach the Holocaust and World War II.

Jiří Kocian started out using the Visual History Archive himself as a researcher. Now, he’s helping others discover testimony as the coordinator of the Malach Center for Visual History at Charles University in Prague.

Social studies teacher Molly Gale learned the ins and outs of IWitness at USC Shoah Foundation’s IWitness Summer Institute in Farmington Hills, Mich., this August. But what she appreciated most, she said, was the time she was given to delve deeply into IWitness and work on her own lesson plans before the training was even over. “Usually [at teacher training workshops] they just throw information at you, but here they presented it and then we had hours to work,” she said. By the end of the three-day workshop, “I had practical lessons written and left ready to roll.”

USC Shoah Foundation is sorry to learn of the death of Andrzej Wajda, Poland’s preeminent filmmaker and the director of the 2002 USC Shoah Foundation documentary Pamiętam (I Remember). Wajda died October 9, 2016, at age 90. Wajda survived World War II in Nazi-occupied Poland with his mother and brother after his father, a captain in the Polish infantry, was killed in the Katyn massacre. He joined the Polish resistance at 16 and served in the Polish Home Army until the end of the war.

Nearly every day since she first received her teacher’s resource guide from Echoes and Reflections this spring, Becky Henderson-Howie has used it to teach her students in northern New York about the Holocaust. The middle- and high school English, Holocaust and Public Speaking teacher met Echoes and Reflections educator Jennifer Goss at the Belfer National Conference for Educators at USHMM in November 2015, and Goss encouraged her to sign up for Echoes and Reflections’ free online professional development courses.

Despite living and going to school near Kiev, 11th grader Angelina Verbovskaya knew very little about the 1941 Babi Yar massacre when she started her training to lead the new Babi Yar IWalk. “I’m ashamed that I even did not know that Babi Yar is located in Kiev,” Verbovskaya said.

Arizona State University Professor Anna Holian visited USC on October 10 to give a lecture at the USC Max Kade Institute for Austrian-German-Swiss Studies. While she was here, she spent two days at USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research watching testimony for her new project on Jewish merchants in Munich and Frankfurt after World War II.

Empathy and concern over her city’s slipping memory of what happened at the Babi Yar ravine colored National Polytechnic University student Svetlana Polkovnikova’s decision to intern with the new Babi Yar IWalk, an educational program that put on a walk around the area guided by testimony clips from the Visual History Archive. “I joined the young interns program because it is very important for me to spread information about the events that happened in Babi Yar,” Polkovnikova said. “I would like modern society to know what happened here not so long ago.”

Since 2011, Jayne Perilstein has worked hard to make a difference at two organizations: USC Shoah Foundation and the University of Pennsylvania. And this month, she was formally recognized by Penn with an award that encompasses her work with both.

Michael Levesque helps his students at After School Matters in Chicago develop the skills they will need to succeed in college and beyond. Two weeks ago, those lessons included a brand new activity from IWitness that inspired his students to think about the world and their place in it.