Walter Berger describes his family and upbringing before the war began in Czechoslovakia. His brother, Sam, is the subject of the new book "Roses in a Forbidden Garden: A Holocaust Love Story," written by Sam's granddaughter Elise Garibaldi.

Poland’s new right-wing government wants to change the way children in that country learn about the Holocaust, casting Poles as only victims or heroes. In this new narration, the Polish people were always helping the weak, were good neighbors and cared about minorities.

Gabriel Krause recalls hearing about the Kielce Pogrom in 1946, Poland.

Malwina Moses describes how anti-Semitism continued in Poland after the war including the Keilce Pogrom in 1946.

Rachel Huber remembers traveling through Poland after the end of the war and hearing about the killing of Jews, those who survived the Holocaust during the Kielce Pogrom in 1946.

A collection of testimony clips of Holocaust survivors who remembering hearing about the pogrom in the Polish town of Kielce.  On July 4, 1946, mobs of Polish people attacked Jewish refugees and survivors returning to their homes after World War II had ended. In these testimony clips eyewitnesses recount the story of how over 40 Jewish people were murdered after they had already survived the Holocaust.  

Polski nowy, prawicowy rząd chce zmienić sposób nauczania polskich uczniów o Zagładzie Żydów, kreując Polaków na wyłącznie ofiary lub bohaterów. W tej nowej narracji Polacy zawsze pomagali słabszym, byli dobrymi sąsiadami i dbali o mniejszości.

Elise Garibaldi had heard her grandparents’ story of falling in love while surviving the Holocaust countless times throughout her life. With her new book Roses in a Forbidden Garden: A Holocaust Love Story, that story is now being shared with the world.

Jenna Leventhal is the associate director of education - digital engagement and oversees IWitness. She received her master’s in public history from the University of Houston and in 2011 joined the staff of the USC Shoah Foundation to work on IWitness, while the educational website was still undergoing testing and development. Leventhal was first introduced to the USC Shoah Foundation as an undergraduate at UC Santa Barbara, working on a project for a public history course.  

Nine teachers gathered at the International school of Brno on Monday for an IWitness hands-on seminar led by Martin Šmok, USC Shoah Foundation’s senior international program consultant based in the Czech Republic.

Students and teachers can now download their video projects constructed in IWitness using the WeVideo editor and their word clouds built in the Information Quest activities. So here are three easy steps for students and teachers to download their work from IWitness!

May 16, 2015 – More than 900 Holocaust testimonies recorded over four decades by the Jewish Family and Children Services Holocaust Center of San Francisco (JFCS) are now fully integrated into USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive as part of the Preserving the Legacy initiative – an ambitious plan to save recorded eyewitness testimony and bring voices of genocide survivors to a wider audience.  

LOS ANGELES, Aug. 12, 2016 – The USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research has established a new endowed academic research fellowship with a gift from four longtime supporters of the Institute.

Detroit-area educators are in the midst of a three-day ITeach Institute to develop their knowledge and skills for teaching with IWitness. The institute, the first of its kind in Michigan, is part of USC Shoah Foundation’s IWitness Detroit program.

Frank Fukuhara, a Japanese soldier during World War II, recalls how he was allowed to return home to Hiroshima about a month after VJ Day. He didn't know about the atomic bomb until he was on the train and heard other passengers talking about it.

Three years ago, Lacey Schauwecker became interested in the Guatemalan Genocide through work she was doing with USC Shoah Foundation. Now, Schauwecker is back for four weeks as a 2016 Summer Graduate Research Fellow at the Center for Advanced Genocide Research utilizing the Institute’s Guatemalan testimonies.

(For directions, click here.)

The two newest activities in IWitness were written by teachers who were inspired to help fellow educators teach their students profound lessons using testimony from the Visual History Archive.

Holocaust survivor Romana Farrington breaks down stereotypes about Catholic Poles during the Holocaust. This clip is part of the new IWitness activity What is "The Danger of a Single Story"?.

About 60 librarians and archivists from the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL) viewed a webinar about the Visual History Archive on Thursday, August 18, hosted by ProQuest and USC Shoah Foundation.

Frances Zatz describes the Polish Home Army's uprising in Warsaw, Poland in August 1944, which was spurred by the belief that Soviet forces across the Vistula River would liberate them. The Soviet army did not intervene, leaving the Warsaw inhabitants to defend themselves against heavy German fire. Among Warsaw Rising fighters were Polish Jews who survived Warsaw Ghetto Uprising that took place a year earlier. Some of them were prisoners of Gesiowka Concentration Camp liberated by Polish Home Army at the very beginning of the Risin, on August 4th, 1944.

In 1912, only two athletes from the Ottoman Empire went  to compete in the Olympics - both were Armenian. Vahram Papazyan was one of them. During his testimony, he recalls fainting in the middle of his race because of anxiety over what he would do and what could happen if he won. During the 1912 Stockholm Olympics the Finnish team, who had participated since 1908 under the Russian flag, refused to march under the Russian flag and was allowed to do so.

Kim Kerwin was one of a select group of teachers who participated in USC Shoah Foundation’s first three-day ITeach Institute in Michigan last week, and she walked away from the training inspired to incorporate testimony into her classes at St. Fabian Catholic School.

The first moderated session at USC Shoah Foundation’s Center for Advanced Genocide Research’s conference, “A Conflict? Genocide and Resistance in Guatemala” will be on “Studying Perpetrators” and be moderated by USC International Relations Professor Carol Wise.

Holocaust survivor Michael Preisler describes how Father Maximilian Kolbe volunteered to take the place of a man who was to be killed at Auschwitz for attempting to escape. Kolbe was locked in a bunker without food or water for two weeks before he was finally killed by lethal injection.

USC Shoah Foundation is accepting applications from students interested in working with testimony for the third year of the Institute’s Junior Intern Program.

Holocaust survivor Rebbetzin Esther Jungreis urges Jews to continue their practice of Judaism and to pass their love for their faith on to their children. Esther passed away August 23, 2016.

This collection of photos offers a rare glimpse of an outdoor Jewish ghetto in the countryside – specifically in Kutno, Poland. The images depict a form of ghetto that was actually more common, but far less known, than the urban settings (i.e. Warsaw Ghetto) that are cemented in the public imagination.

Gordon Klasky describes the conditions of the Kutno ghetto in Poland.

The Watch page on IWitness has added Polish-language testimony clips for the first time, plus several other Hungarian and English-language clips, in time for the start of the 2016-2017 school year.