Abraham Bomba remembers arriving to the Treblinka extermination camp and the selection process for the gas chambers.

Dirouhi Haigas was a young Turkish-Armenian girl of 7 when she and her family were abruptly uprooted from their home and deported on foot to the southern desert. A native of Konya, Turkey, she had lived an idyllic life up to that time with her parents, grandparents, aunt, and uncles. Her father was in the family business as a leather merchant, and her uncles were amateur musicians who loved nothing more than to get together with friends and relatives to enjoy folk music and dancing.  This life came to an abrupt end with the outbreak of World War I.

Emmanuel Muhinda describes the persecution of Tutsi and anti-Tutsi propaganda he witnessed before the genocide started in April 1994. His testimony is featured in the IWitness activity, Information Quest: The Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda.

Freddy Mutanguha remembers saying goodbye to his mother before she was murdered during the Rwanda Tutsi Genocide.

Rose Burizhiza speaks on the discrimination she faced in school before the genocide began in Rwanda. Rose’s testimony is featured in the IWitness activity, Information Quest: The Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda.

Yehudi Lindeman reflects on his childhood in Holland and recalls the anti-Semitism he experienced from other children.

Erna Anolik recalls the intake procedures at Auschwitz, including shaving off her hair, undressing in front of soldiers, and only being given a grey dress and wooden shoes.

Bronia Hatfield speaks on the mass killings that took place near her village in the region of Wolyn. By the end of World War II, 98.5 percent of Wolyn’s Jewish population was dead and most of the towns destroyed.

Sam Kadorian remembers the separation and killings of Armenian families during the 1915 genocide.    

Alphonse Kabalisa recalls listening to anti-Tutsi propaganda on the radio with his father, after the death of Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana. Alphonse’s testimony is featured in the IWitness activity, Information Quest: The Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda

Lina Jackson remembers the roundup of her family members because they were Sinti and Roma, and their subsequent deportation to Auschwitz. She describes the difficult conditions of the cattle car. This testimony clip is featured in the book, Testimony – The Legacy of Schindler’s List and the USC Shoah Foundation.  

Sinti and Roma survivor, Ella Davis speaks about arriving to Auschwitz and how SS guards took all her possessions and cut off her hair. This is the fifth testimony clip in the series 70 Days of Testimony: Leading up to the 70th Anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz.

Roma-Sinti Survivor Julia describes how her family’s lack of awareness of war events led to their incarceration at Auschwitz II-Birkenau. 

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

Nina Kaleska talks about how she responds to people that say the Holocaust never happened. She says it is not worth arguing about because it only gives their ideas more attention and the evidence of the Holocaust is overwhelming. 

Martin Becker talks about having various people walk through the concentration camp in Dachau and overhearing a man explaining that the various corpses lying around were brought in from Russia to "scare everyone." He says that responses like that are contagious when you are under stress and caught "red-handed."

Holocaust liberator Ed Carter Edwards on how his eyewitness testimony along with others helps combat Holocaust denial.

Guatemalan Genocide survivor Aracely Garrido reflects on the seemingly eternal suffering endured by indigenous civilian non-combatant populations in a Guatemalan village who practiced their own limited form of resistance during the war.

Dario Gabbai recalls his experiences as a Sonderkommando in Auschwitz II-Birkenau. He was forced to usher people into gas chambers, and then haul out the bodies, take them to the crematorium, and clean up the room for the next group of victims.

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Jean Greenstein describes the three months he spent with two other men and a woman hiding in an underground bunker. At one point the German troops came into the town and made their headquarters directly above the bunker where Jean and the others were hiding.

Tracy Sockalosky teaches 7th Grade Social Studies at Wilson Middle School in Natick, Mass. In January 2015, Sockalosky was one of the 25 educators who participated in the Auschwitz: The Past is Present professional development program in Poland.

This year I focused on eyewitness testimony to the Holocaust and it changed the experience for my students and for me.

At a training led by USC Shoah Foundation education staff, Rwandan teachers learned how to build IWitness activities and incorporate IWitness into the new Rwandan national curriculum.

Emily Kocontes is a junior at USC studying Popular Music Performance with a minor in Music Industry. Emily has been interning with USC Shoah Foundation for the communications department since September of 2015. 

I attended the event “Melodies of Auschwitz” at the Willard Intercontinental Hotel in Washington D.C. on Thursday, March 10, 2016, hosted by PNC Bank to recognize USC Shoah Foundation for its work in genocide education and preserving testimony of genocides around the world. The event was educational and meaningful, bringing together PNC clients, employees, and all other guests into a conversation about the importance of preserving testimony and what USC Shoah Foundation is all about.

In his lecture at USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research March 29, Professor Dan Stone offered a global perspective of the origins and history of concentration camps.

Adela Ackerman describes seeing her sister for the first time after liberation.

Louis Micheels describes the conditions inside Mechelen concentration camp in Belgium.

Zovaira Rodriguez is the Procurement Specialist for the USC Shoah Foundation and has been with the institute for 3 years.  She works within our Operations Department overseeing and managing all purchasing requests along with vendor intake, setup, and requesting payments. Prior to the Institute, Zovaira received her Bachelors in Criminal Justice with a Minor in Anthropology from the California State University of Los Angeles.