APIP has been a powerful force for Polish teachers over the past year, says Polish Regional Consultant Monika Koszynska.

POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews premiered an original short film about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising featuring testimony from the Visual History Archive.

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.

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.

Eleven new lesson plans and long term educational projects were developed during the fourth Polish edition of the Teaching with Testimony program.

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.

IWitness is expanding its offerings for non-English speakers.

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.  

A new monument honoring victims of women’s slave labor camps, most of whom were Polish Jewish teenagers at the time, was unveiled on May 9th, 2016, the 71st anniversary of their liberation, in Trutnov, Czech Republic. The camps, part of Organization Shmelt, were located by textile mills and included: Gabersdorf, Parshnitz, Schatzlar, Ober Alstadt, Bernsdorf, Arnau, Dunkenthal, Hohenelbe, Ober Hohenelbe, Leibau and Bausnitz. After the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, they became concentration camps grouped under the administration of Gross-Rosen.

Professor Atina Grossmann gave a public lecture co-hosted by the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research and the USC Max Kade Institute, offering a different reading of World War II and the Holocaust by mapping Jewish death, survival, and displacement via what she called the geographical margins – the colonial and semi-colonial regions including the Soviet interior, Central Asia, Iran, and British India.

The fifth annual Master Teacher program in Poland (formerly called Teaching with Testimony in the 21st Century) introduced thirteen educators to the Visual History Archive, sparking new ideas for teaching their students about the Holocaust and current events in their country.

IWitness now offers so many testimony clips and activities in multiple languages that new filters have been added to the Watch page and Activity Library to help users easily discover resources in their own language.

After a short stay in the city's orphanage in Warsaw, Michal Glowiński was taken to a Catholic orphanage run by nuns in Turkowice, where he was hidden along with over thirty other Jewish children. The sisters showed dedication and kindness for hiding Jewish children. This is one of the first Polish-language clips to be added to the IWitness Watch page.

On the heels of filming its first-ever Mandarin-language testimony last week, New Dimensions in Testimony added another language to its repertoire of genocide survivor interviews: Holocaust survivor Nimrod “Zigi” Ariav’s Hebrew-language testimony, filmed this week at USC Institute for Creative Technologies.

After his arrest in September 1942, Stefan Kosinski was incarcerated while awaiting his trial. In this clip, he recounts the conditions in the jail and his memory of seeing his mother out the window of his jail cell keeping vigil. She is also present during his trial before the Nazi court, which sentences Stefan to five years hard labor. Foreign words in this clip:pedo (Polish): derogatory term for a gay personschwul (German): gay, homosexualZuchthaus (German): penitentiary

USC Shoah Foundation’s international consultants in Poland and Czech Republic ended 2015 introducing the work of the Institute to new audiences.

USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research will host a steady stream of undergraduate, graduate and faculty fellows this summer who will conduct research in the Visual History Archive for a wide range of projects and courses.

USC Shoah Foundation Teaching Fellows Alina Bothe and Gertrud Pickhan’s course “The Deportation of Polish Jews from Berlin in 1938” has led to another family learning its fate for the first time and receiving a special memorial called a “Stolperstein.”

English translation: “As steel is forged by punches so is our personality. Punches harden and teach us to fight, to continue to fight, to meet challenges, to find new ones and overcome them.  I think that my message in this interview is that such is life. It means to overcome and to forge ahead. Punches can come from where we least expect and we must not fall down—if we do, we must get up. Not all people are bad. The Polish people were not all Antisemitic. Many were good people. And what I have to say to people is to be aware and to use reason.

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.

Nineteen educators gathered at Central European University Budapest the first weekend in July to share the activities they piloted in the classroom after being initiated into the Master Teacher program in Hungary last year.

In January 2015, I had the incredible opportunity to travel to Poland with other students, as a junior intern, for USC Shoah Foundation’s and Discovery Education’s Auschwitz: Past is Present program, commemorating the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

Armenian Genocide Survivor Hovsana Kumjian sings the ballad Der Zor Chollerende (Desert of Der Zor). During the genocide victims sang this song in Turkish while on the forced marches into the Syrian Desert. The song is often from a child’s perspective and describes violent scenes and feelings of hopelessness. Kumjian states she sings this song in memory for the victims, every April 24, the anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. Kumjian is a survivor of the death march from Kilis, Turkey. English Translation of Der Zor Chollerende

In January 2015, I traveled to Poland for the Auschwitz: Past is Present professional development program, commemorating the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau. This entire experience, was and continues to be a life changing event for me on every level personally, professionally, and academically.

The young Nazi approached 13-year-old Szulem Czygielmamn as he walked on the sidewalk of Lubartowska Street in Lublin, Poland, and shoved him off the sidewalk. Szulem was lucky; Jews had died for less.

Neumark spoke to undergraduate students in Wolf Gruner's "Resistance to Genocide" class and donated two postcards he wrote while he was evading the Nazis.

As fall meets winter, we find ourselves in the seasonal in-between – summer is gone and winter is not yet biting. Yet it is in the in-between that we find moments for appreciation with friends and family. We create these moments in the cycle of the seasons. I think about what it means to live in the in-between – in a place of ambiguity and uncertainty where we must negotiate both the successes and the struggles of daily life. Progress propels us forward, but sometimes it is a roller coaster rather than the smooth gradient we may wish for.

Howard Cwick was born in the Bronx, New York, on August 25, 1923, to Samuel and Sarah Cwick, both Polish immigrants. Howard had an older sister, Sylvia. TheCwick family spoke both English and Yiddish, kept a kosher home, and attended synagogue three times a week. Howard went to school at P.S. 100 in the Bronx beforegoing on to Brooklyn Technical High School. When he was seven years old, Howard received his first camera and became interested in photography.

A person doesn’t visit the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Poland and come away unchanged, and I was no exception. The empty barracks, the barbed-wire fencing, the solemn exhibits, the telltale chimneys – all these vestiges left a strong impression. But what struck me most was the sheer vastness of the sprawling memorial to history’s most notorious death camp. Walking through Birkenau with my tour group, I gaped at the emptiness stretching for a mile in every direction – nothing but the crumbling remains of buildings half-buried in snow.