When Maetal Haas-Kogan was just a few months old, her great-grandfather Benjamin Oudkerk gave his testimony to USC Shoah Foundation. Now, she’s a Harvard freshman and spending half of her winter break interning in USC Shoah Foundation’s education department.Haas-Kogan said she grew up hearing stories about her family’s survival of the Holocaust. Her great-grandfather had survived the war mostly hiding in the home of friends who were also part of the resistance underground movement, and adopted her grandfather as a young boy after the war.

After learning about IWitness from an Echoes and Reflections seminar, Tim Derbish incorporated it into a Holocaust project his school has assigned for nearly 20 years.At Dorseyville Middle School in Pittsburgh, Penn., every year the eighth graders complete a Holocaust research project called the Notebook of Remembrance. Students research different aspects of the Holocaust and produce essays, personal accounts, and other creative works.

USC Shoah Foundation intern Mahima Verma has spent the past year taking a brand-new type of testimony: the stories of second- and third-generation survivors.Verma, a sophomore history major at USC, first began working on the project in October 2014 at the suggestion of Karen Jungblut, director of research and documentation. The two devised a plan for Verma to take a small number of life history testimonies of the children and grandchildren of genocide survivors. Verma would then present her findings to staff of USC Shoah Foundation.

It’s been three and a half years since Kosal Path’s Institute Fellowship at USC Shoah Foundation. Looking back, he says the fellowship ended up changing his life.

Kerri Flynn, a history teacher at Washington High School in Union, Missouri, has used IWitness to introduce her students to a variety of people who survived genocide.After learning about IWitness at last year’s National Council of Teacher of English (NCTE) conference in Washington, D.C., Flynn created her own Information Quest activity using Rwandan Tutsi Genocide testimonies to introduce her students to modern genocides – which most of them have not ever heard of, she said.

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.

Executive Director Stephen Smith discusses the impact of Auschwitz: The Past is Present on USC Shoah Foundation