The museum staff and students were among the first to see the NDT testimony of Nanjing Massacre survivor Madame Xia Shuqin.

We are sad to learn of the passing of Kurt Messerschmidt, Holocaust survivor, educator and beloved cantor. He was 102. Messerschmidt was born Jan. 2, 1915 in Weneuchen, Germany, but moved to Berlin in 1918 and excelled as a linguistics scholar, gymnast and musician. He was well-respected and a leader among his classmates and teachers, but was unable to attend college because of anti-Jewish measures implemented by the Nazis.

On July 30, 1937 the head of Soviet secret police Nikolai Ezhov signed the order that started a mass punitive operation against their own citizens.

Evgeniia Fizdel was born in 1923 in Odessa, then Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic (today Odesa, Ukraine). She lived with her parents in Odessa when in August 1937 her father, Adol’f Fizdel, was arrested as a “German spy” and sent to a Soviet concentration camp. In 1940, he was released from the camp. When the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Evgeniia evacuated to Ufa, a city in the Urals, where she continued her medical training. In 1944, she was drafted into the Soviet army and as a military doctor and participated in the liberation of Poland and Germany.

Elena Zavadskaiia was born in 1925 in Mogilev-Podol’skii, then USSR (today Mohyliv-Podil’skii, Ukraine). Her parents, Evgenii and Konstantsiia Zavadskiii, were ethnic Poles, and because of their nationality in 1937 they became potential targets of order #00447. On November 1, 1937, her father was arrested. Soon after, her mother, Konstantsiia, was told that Evgenii had been sentenced to “ten years of corrective labor camps without the right of correspondence”—a Soviet euphemism for a sentence of execution by shooting.

Cambodian Genocide survivor Saoran Latour explains how she came to realize that her husband had died. She first suspected it after having a dream.

We are sad to learn of the passing of Kurt Messerschmidt, Holocaust survivor, educator and beloved cantor. He was 102. Messerschmidt was born Jan. 2, 1915 in Weneuchen, Germany, but moved to Berlin in 1918 and excelled as a linguistics scholar, gymnast and musician. He was well-respected and a leader among his classmates and teachers, but was unable to attend college because of anti-Jewish measures implemented by the Nazis.