Four of the five Center Summer 2016 research fellows gathered to publicly present and discuss their research using the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive (VHA).

Alexander Korb, the 2016-2017 Center Research Fellow and director of the Stanley Burton Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Leicester, gave a public lecture at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research focusing on his research on collaboration in the Holocaust in eastern and southeastern Europe.

For the past couple years, high school English teacher Matthew Otis has incorporated IWitness into his unit on the Holocaust and intolerance. Now, IWitness’s 100 Days to Inspire Respect program has inspired him to share his students’ process of cross-cultural understanding with a larger audience. Otis, who teaches at Everett Area High School in Pennsylvania, first learned about IWitness and Echoes and Reflections at a teaching conference last year and since then has used testimony as a resource in his unit on the Holocaust.

Since October, Evy Stumpff has been an unconventional Junior Intern with USC Shoah Foundation. While the rest of the young interns have spent the past several months analyzing, together, what attitudes breed hatred and intolerance and how they can spread positive moral authority and become active participants in civil society – learning from USC Shoah Foundation’s IWitness activities and the Visual History Archive – Stumpff has had to leap over one major obstacle to do the same work.

For Lucy Fried, storytelling is the best way to make an impact. The high school sophomore is a Junior Intern with USC Shoah Foundation, and as such, has spent one day every month for the past five months listening to testimony from the Institute’s Visual History Archive – to the stories and memories of Holocaust and genocide survivors.

For the past semester and a half, Nic Chavez has spent one day out of every month at USC Shoah Foundation’s home at USC’s Leavey Library, discussing with his fellow Junior Interns at the Institute what attitudes breed hatred and intolerance, and how derivatives can be quelled.

Robert Ackles has slogged up the 405 from San Diego to Los Angeles once a month, every month, for almost two years. He’s sat through the heat and the desperate freeway traffic for one reason, and one reason alone: to visit USC Shoah Foundation’s home at USC’s Leavey Library as a Junior Intern. Part of a small group of young students, Ackles meets periodically to discuss and analyze such topics as hatred, prejudice, intolerance and how to stop both using positive moral guidance and active participation in society.

As a little kid, Toni Nickel never could settle between Sesame Street and the History Channel, her interest in other people’s stories of war piqued such that learning the colors and the order of the numbers became forever secondary. Her curiosity – specifically in the Holocaust – came to a head in college when she took a History of the Holocaust course that used the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive. There, in a classroom at Texas A&M University, Nickel knew her fate and future were sealed.

When students learn about refugees in IWitness, it will be Tomás Rafa’s documentary video footage of the current-day refugee crisis in Europe that will help them make connections between refugees of the past and present.

“Hate starts with fear of others.” “Be informed. Don’t judge. Learn love.” “Remove appearance. We’re all the same.” Ninth graders in Sara Mehltretter’s world cultures and geography class at Tampa Catholic High School in Tampa, Fla., wrote these six-word stories and many others, and shared them with not only each other but also their whole school.