A public lecture by the 2017-2018 Research Week team Lorena Ávila (Centro Internacional de Toledo para la Paz, Colombia) Daniela Gleizer (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, México) Emmanuel Kahan (Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Argentina) Nancy Nichols (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Chile) Yael Siman (Universidad Iberoamericana, México) Susana Sosenski (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, México) Alejandra Morales Stekel (Director, Interactive Jewish Museum of Chile, Chile)

A public lecture by Christian Delage (Director of the Institut D’Histoire Du Temps Présent, Paris)                    

The need for continued memorialization of the fate of the Roma and Sinti population of Europe has never been more important.

Roma and Sinti survivor Ella Davis describes how she was punished for getting caught stealing potatoes at Auschwitz.

What are the pillars of modern democracy and how can democracy be defended in days of crisis? These questions keep coming to me these days, when Poland faces a really serious crisis that so far has caused a huge polarization in Polish society that divides neighbors, colleagues, friends, even families. Being an educator for almost 30 years, teaching first young students, then teenagers and finally teachers about history, civil rights and human rights, I have realized what a huge setback the Polish educational system has suffered.

Gerson Adler recalls the Stürmer newspaper issued by the Nazi party that promulgated antisemitic stereotypes.

In this clip, Henry Sinason, a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, recalls how widespread Nazi antisemitic propaganda was all over the city where he lived.

Educators learned how Holocaust survivor testimonies from the Visual History Archive can help them teach early conflict prevention and cultural sensitivity at a workshop led by USC Shoah Foundation’s Ukrainian regional consultant, Anna Lenchovska.

Suzi Weiss-Fischmann’s mother survived Auschwitz because upon arrival to the camp she was sent to the line to the right designated for slave labor. Her grandmother and uncles were directed to the left, to die in gas chambers because they were considered too old or too young to work.

Daniel Conway, Texas A&M University, and Nancy Sinkoff, Rutgers University, have both been in residence at the Center for Advanced Genocide Research this week.

The ‘Third Workshop for Advanced PhD Candidates from North American Universities and Israel who are working on the Holocaust’, co-sponsored by the USC Shoah Foundation Center For Advanced Genocide Research and Yad Vashem, took place from June 25 to June 29, 2017 at the International Institute for Holocaust Research in Yad Vashem.

As a documentary filmmaker, historian and curator, Christian Delage has long consulted with and used video testimonies of Holocaust survivors in his work.

“Filming the Camps” explores the World War II experiences of Hollywood directors John Ford, George Stevens and Samuel Fuller.

Martha Stroud, PhD, is the Associate Director and Senior Research Officer of the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research. She manages the day-to-day operations of the Center, which advances innovative interdisciplinary research on the Holocaust and other genocides and promotes use of the Visual History Archive in research and teaching. She joined the Center in 2015 after earning her PhD in Medical Anthropology at UC Berkeley.

After a long period of neglect, the study of genocides against Indigenous populations is becoming an increasingly larger part of the field of genocide studies.

McBride will first give a lunchtime workshop on how to use the Visual History Archive in research and teaching. At 7 p.m., he will give a lecture "Of course, they were Neighbors": Testimony, Archives and the Holocaust in Ukraine.” Both will be held at Belk Library and Information Commons room 114.

Hilda Mantelmacher’s life features many defining moments, yet three in particular stand apart from the rest: going through the Holocaust; an episode of 60 Minutes; and the film Schindler’s List.

Testimonies from the Visual History Archive’s newest collection have been added to IWitness in time for the upcoming school year along with a Mini Quest multimedia activity.

​Four years after completing a visiting fellowship at USC Shoah Foundation, Professor Jeffrey Shandler’s extensive research into the Visual History Archive has culminated in a new book.

Holocaust survivor Alexander Van Kollem recalls when stationed as an American soldier in Virginia during the Korean War his first encounter with institutionalized racism as he attempted to take a public bus.

At the behest of his father, 17-year-old Erwin Rautenberg boarded a steamer for South America in 1937 to escape Nazi Germany. His brother, sister, and parents planned to join him, but never made it. His father died in 1938, soon after being
forced into the German army. The rest of the family was killed during the Holocaust.

One year after the Future of Storytelling Festival exhibited USC Shoah Foundation’s New Dimensions in Testimony, Gustman has been invited back to give a talk at the 2017 Future of Storytelling Summit on October 4-5.

The film will be exhibited as part of the festival’s first-ever competition for films made in virtual reality.

Blake Humphrey is the Student Body President at West Virginia University and a member of USC Shoah Foundation’s Intercollegiate Diversity Congress. He will be participating in the upcoming Intercollegiate Diversity Congress Summit at USC Shoah Foundation in Los Angeles this October.

When I visited Nazi death camps in 2014, I viewed spaces filled with the spirits of so many lives lost and witnessed the end result of evil, intolerance, and hatred. I left the gas chambers at Auschwitz and Majdanek that summer thinking that the sick, twisted ideology that drove the Nazis and was fueled by hatred and ignorance no longer existed in the 21st Century, especially in the United States. I naively believed Nazi ideology had ceased to exist with the end of World War II and the Holocaust.

Kurt Messerschmidt remembers the role of bystanders and explains the importance of standing up to injustice.

Armed with insights gathered during her two-week research trip to USC Shoah Foundation, Professor Maria Rita Corticelli is ready to begin building an archive of testimonies of minority groups who have experienced various forms of mass violence, including genocide and ethnic cleansing, in Iraq. “It’s something that is absolutely missing because there is nothing on Iraq regarding genocides committed there, not only the last one by ISIS but the ones committed before,” Corticelli said. “There is no centralized database where these testimonies are together.”

Less than a week after the neo-Nazi rallies in Charlottesville, Virginia, USC Shoah Foundation received a call from Blake Humphrey, student body president of West Virginia University. How could he work with USC Shoah Foundation to speak out against this blatant display of hatred and bigotry?

Much of the content is geared toward addressing some of the many conflicts that came to light during and in the wake of the neo-Nazi, white supremacist rallies in Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 15, 2017, such as the importance of speaking out against hate, promoting tolerance and acceptance, and embracing diversity.