In her testimony in the Visual History Archive, Lisa Slater describes seeing a cattle car filled with Jewish men, women and children during the Holocaust– but unlike most survivors in the archive who remember seeing such a thing, she was never forced inside it.Slater is one of the few “witnesses” to the Holocaust who gave testimony to USC Shoah Foundation – people who were not persecuted, nor acted as rescuers or aid-providers, but merely observed the events of the Holocaust unfolding around them.

Lisa Slater, who served as a teletypist in the German army durign World War II, remembers seeing a cattle car train filled with Jewish men, women and children. She had never seen such a thing and did not know where they were going.

Starting immediately, ProQuest will become the exclusive distributor of USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive to colleges and universities around the world.

Los Angeles, January 21, 2016 – To meet growing demand for access to the world’s largest archive of genocide testimony, USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education announces its Visual History Archive Program, which will reimagine how users connect to the testimonies.Made possible by an initial transformative donation from Lee Liberman, a member of the Institute’s Board of Councilors Executive Committee, the wide-ranging, five-year plan will look to:

A lecture by Benjamin Madley (University of California, Los Angeles) USC, Social Sciences Building, Room 250 

In his testimony for the Armenian Film Foundation, recorded in 2012, Armenian Genocide survivor Sebooh Gertmenian describes how he survived the genocide as a three year old with the help of his mother.The interviewer marvels at his mother’s strength, how she was able to keep her children alive on a forced march through the desert after her husband and older child had been murdered. Gertmenian, perhaps having never thought of his mother in this way before, says with wonder, “She must have been an angel.”

In the first step of an ambitious multiyear plan to significantly broaden access and meet growing demand for the world's largest archive of genocide testimony, USC Shoah Foundation - The Institute for Visual History and Education announces a landmark partnership with ProQuest, a technology company that empowers researchers at universities, libraries, schools and knowledge-driven organizations around the world.

One class was in Charlotte, North Carolina. The other, in Kigali, Rwanda. But on Friday, March 4, nearly 60 students came together via Skype to talk about what they learned from IWitness’s Bystander Effect activity.

Emily Bengels’s students are already well on their way to submitting their projects to the IWitness Video Challenge.

Aaron Cohen describes moving to Los Angeles and looking for a stable job. After he found his calling, he never missed a day of work in 42 years.

Renée Firestone had successful career as fashion designer after moving to Los Angeles. She recalls the conversation that convinced her to tell her story.

On September 11, 2001, USC Shoah Foundation was deep into its mission to collect testimonies of Holocaust survivors all over the world. On that particular morning in New York City, survivor Miriam Tauber was scheduled to record her testimony in her daughter’s home. Then, the tragedy struck.In the opening moments of her testimony, Tauber’s interviewer, Nancy Fisher, decided to address the crisis currently unfolding in Manhattan. She explains that the start of the interview was delayed three hours because of the uncertainty of the day, but they had now decided to attempt it.

In order to supplement her students’ reading of Anne Frank and other Holocaust diaries, Kayla Strickland turned to IWitness for the first time.Strickland, an English Language Arts teacher at Five Points School in Alabama, first heard about IWitness at a workshop led by the Birmingham Holocaust Education Center. She was excited to show her students the survivor testimony videos so they could have a personal connection to what they read about the Holocaust.

Aided by their exploration of the Visual History Archive, three students and a professor from USC presented a panel discussion at the fifth annual ucLADINO Symposium at UCLA March 2-3, 2015.

The film originally premiered at Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum on January 27, 2015, the commemoration ceremony for the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the camp.

Ashlynn Chong has always loved music. In fact, the 14 year old from Los Angeles, who can play 10 instruments, is currently on tour with the musical group Kidz Bop. When she’s not going to school or performing, however, Chong is a junior intern at USC Shoah Foundation.“It is such an amazing opportunity, and I have already learned so much,” Chong said of the junior intern program, which she is participating in for the second year.

USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research is offering summer fellowships for undergraduate students, graduate students, and faculty at University of Southern California. The deadline to submit an application is March 31, 2016.

Some 72 years after he fought with an American unit that helped liberate France during World War II, journalist Tom Tugend has received France’s highest civilian honor.Tugend and nine other veterans were honored in a ceremony on March 9. Tugend was appointed as Chevalier (Knight) in the National Order of the Legion of Honor for his service in the U.S. infantry in Alsace, attached to the 1st French Army in its fight against Germany.

Auschwitz survivor Eva Kor will be in Los Angeles next week to film an interview for New Dimensions in Testimony, USC Shoah Foundation’s three-dimensional, interactive virtual encounter with Holocaust survivors.

IWitness continues to add new testimony clips to its Watch page, which cover a range of topics from Japanese internment to the Armenian Genocide.

At the spring gathering of the Union of Civics Educators in Prague on March 19, teachers learned about IWitness as a tool for teaching about refugees.

Jack Wysoki says that he survived the Holocaust because of a combination of determination, focus, and refusal to give up.

Growing up, Fred Wysoki knew both his parents were Holocaust survivors, but didn’t know much about their experience beyond that.“Subconsciously, I knew that [talking about it] was painful, and I honored that by not upsetting either one of them with prying questions,” he said.

Emma Heinz, Natalie Podstawka and Lisa Farese share their tips for constructing a winning video.

Presented by The Documentation Center for North Africa Jewry durign World War II, the Ben Zvi Institute, International Institute for Holocaust Research, Yad Vashem

USC Shoah Foundation’s project to record testimonies of Jews who experienced persecution while living in the Middle East and Africa during the Holocaust will be a topic of discussion at the "Jews of the Middle East in the Shadow of the Holocaust" conference Jerusalem on April 5, 2016.

Cambodian Genocide survivor Sara Pol-Lim explains that she feels a responsibility to make something of her life to honor her family members who did not survive.

Ten years ago, Sanne van Heijst was working on developing teaching materials at the museum of Konzentrationslager Herzogenbusch, or Vught, a former concentration camp in the Netherlands. Van Heijst was looking for a way to get through to the students who would visit the museum.“I was looking for a common thread that would help pupils to make a connection between the different groups of prisoners from the camp and the different events that happened,” she said.

Just a few days before the start of Genocide Awareness Month in April, USC Shoah Foundation will launch a new mini-site dedicated to commemorating the six genocides represented in the Visual History Archive.