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.”