Now several months into her USC Shoah Foundation Junior Internship, Mackenzie Westman, junior at Eagle Rock High School Highly Gifted Magnet, has come to understand how you can counter all of the elements that can fuel hate. The monthly meetings at the Institute, and concurrent viewings of testimony from USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive, have been paramount in shaping her perception.

Marisa Fox-Bevilacqua grew up never knowing that her mother was a Holocaust survivor. That is, until a series of discoveries after her mother’s death led her to the truth: her mother had survived Gabersdorf, a slave labor camp for Jewish girls and young women, for four and a half years – and had never said a word about it.

A little more than 70 years ago, two-year-old Mickey Shapiro arrived with his parents, Holocaust survivors Sara and Asa Shapiro, in the United States from a Displaced Persons camp in Germany. When they came to America, Mickey estimates that they had about $8 in their pocket. Sara and Asa built a life and family here in America where they worked with dedication to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive. Mickey honors his parents and carries on that legacy through his work with USC Shoah Foundation.

When a long-awaited maternity leave struck USC Shoah Foundation’s communications department, Holly Blackwelder was there to carry the social-media-manager torch, stepping into the position three weeks ago and embracing it with ease. A temporary successor to Deanna Hendrick, Blackwelder will continue to work as social media manager through the summer.

USC Shoah Foundation is saddened to learn of the passing of Holocaust survivor Curt Lowens, a wartime hero who became a well-known character actor when he moved to the United States. He was 91. Born Curt Lowenstein on Nov. 17, 1925 in Germany, Lowen and his family had planned to emigrate to the United States as World War II was starting, but they were stopped from leaving the Netherlands when the Germans invaded that country. He was briefly deported to the Westerbork concentration camp in 1943, but he was released because of his father’s business connections.

Political scientist Yael Siman used to think she couldn’t be part of the Holocaust studies field because she’s not a historian. But after discovering USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive, she has embarked on her own research project and has even begun collaborating with the Institute’s education department on new lessons for university students.

Social studies teacher Linda O’Dwyer’s first experience with IWitness showed her how creative her students could be while learning how to counter hate.

For the past two months, the USC Shoah Foundation communications department has had a temporary new member: Leonie Schueler-Springorum, a recent high school graduate from Germany who has been an enthusiastic assistant on a variety of communications tasks.

For more than two decades, George Weiss made his way to USC Shoah Foundation almost every week, to add yet another layer to the story he is helping preserve. Sentence by sentence, memory by memory, Weiss wants to ensure that history does not get lost.