Early this year, when the Swedish History Museum opened its exhibit about the Holocaust – an exhibit that includes USC Shoah Foundation testimonies and some of its interactive biographies – it marked the state-funded museum’s first foray into the topic. The exhibit has been a major success, say two Swedish museum professionals who played a prominent role in the installation, and who came to USC Shoah Foundation’s headquarters in Los Angeles last week to discuss taking the partnership to the next level.
DiT, museum, Swedish History Museum / Wednesday, September 11, 2019
Painter David Kassan has sat with survivors of the Holocaust for countless hours during the past five years, carefully listening to their stories of pain, grief, resilience and quiet victory.
David Kassan, art, exhibit, fisher / Tuesday, September 17, 2019
This clip reel features several Holocaust survivors talking about the antisemitism they experienced in relation to the sports they played during the Nazi era in Germany.
/ Wednesday, October 2, 2019
Jewish track-and-field athlete Margaret Lambert remembers the pressure she felt when competing in the Adolf Hitler Stadium during the 1936 Olympic tryouts for a non-Jewish audience that objected to her presence. Maria Breitinger had her decathelon medal denied by her antisemitic school principal. Jules Forgacs remembers his first soccer match after liberation.
sports, margaret lambert, antiSemitism / Wednesday, September 25, 2019
We are saddened to hear of the recent passing of Jack Welner, who survived a Jewish ghetto in Poland, a labor camp near the Dachau concentration camp in Germany, and the Auschwitz Nazi death camp in Poland – where his mother was murdered on arrival – before immigrating to Denver, Colorado, where he began a new life. He was 98. When Welner gave his testimony to USC Shoah Foundation in 1995, it changed his life.
/ Friday, September 27, 2019
The Institute for Visual History and Education introduces its first-ever testimony-based podcast, We Share the Same Sky. In a seven-episode arc, We Share the Same Sky presents an intimate portrait of Rachael Cerrotti’s family history and her own personal journey of love and loss as she retraces the steps of her grandmother, Hana Seckel-Drucker, who was displaced across Europe during and in the wake of World War II.
podcast, education / Monday, September 30, 2019
Max Glauben was 13 when his family’s apartment was destroyed in the historic battle of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Eva Kuper was 2 when her mother’s cousin rescued her from a train in the frantic moments before it headed to the Treblinka death camp. Both lost parents and other relatives in the Holocaust. And both are among the four Holocaust survivors whose testimonies USC Shoah Foundation is recording this week using cutting-edge, 360-degree filming techniques at the physical locations of their pre-war and wartime experiences, as well as their places of liberation.
360 testimony / Wednesday, May 15, 2019
/ Thursday, October 3, 2019
/ Thursday, October 3, 2019
/ Thursday, October 3, 2019
/ Friday, October 4, 2019
In 2020, on Indigenous Peoples' Day (formerly known as Columbus Day) -- October 12, 2020 -- the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research will launch a three-day international conference entitled “Mass Violence and Its Lasting Impact on Indigenous Peoples - The Case of the Americas and Australia/Pacific Region”.
cagr / Friday, October 4, 2019
In this webinar, the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research team will provide a deep dive into the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, including its history; methodologies of testimony collection, preservation, and indexing; current state of the archive and its collections; and how to use its search engines and interface for research and teaching. The participants will learn how to unlock the research potential of the archive and be able to ask questions and get assistance with effectively searching the archive.
cagr / Friday, October 11, 2019
cagr / Friday, October 11, 2019
The largest audiovisual collection of its kind in the world, the Holocaust Collection is composed of over 54,000 WWII era testimonies of Jewish survivors, political prisoners, Sinti and Roma survivors, Jehovah's Witness survivors, survivors of eugenics policies, and gay male survivors, as well as rescuers and aid providers, liberators, and participants in war crimes trials.
/ Monday, October 14, 2019
In 1975, a communist regime known as the Khmer Rouge conquered the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh. The occupation set in motion a four-year campaign of genocide that would wipe out 2 million people – a quarter of the country’s population. Developed through a partnership between USC Shoah Foundation and the Documentation Center of Cambodia, the Cambodian Genocide Collection offers testimonies of survivors who escaped the killings from 1975 to 1979.
/ Monday, October 14, 2019
An introduction to the mission and the work of the Center for Advanced Genocide Research at USC Shoah Foundation.
cagr / Tuesday, October 15, 2019
In 2013, the Visual History Archive expanded beyond the Holocaust for the first time, taking in 147 audiovisual testimonies of survivors and witnesses of the Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. That set of atrocities claimed as many as one million lives over the course of about 100 days in 1994 when government-backed militias of ethnic Hutus went on a mass killing spree targeting the country’s next largest ethnic group, the Tutsis.
/ Monday, October 21, 2019
The Armenian Genocide testimony collections include several categories of individuals linked directly or indirectly to the calamity. The vast majority are Armenian Genocide survivors, while others are Armenian descendants (second and third generation), scholars, rescuers and aid providers, foreign witnesses, and Yezidi survivors, as well as Arab and Greek eyewitnesses. The interviews were recorded in 10 languages in 13 countries.
/ Monday, October 21, 2019
The Fundación de Antropología Forense de Guatemala (FAFG) has collected more than 500 video interviews from Guatemalan survivors and witnesses in Guatemala. All conducted in Spanish or K’iche’, the testimonies are being preserved and indexed by USC Shoah Foundation, which began adding them to the Visual History Archive in 2016. Currently there are 32 testimonies searchable in the Visual History Archive. FAFG continues to collect and grow the Guatemalan testimonies and collection.
/ Monday, October 21, 2019
In December of 1937, during the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Japanese military invaded Nanjing, China, and engaged in a campaign of mass killing. Some of the witnesses live on in our Nanjing collection.
/ Tuesday, October 22, 2019
In August of 2017, the military and local collaborators in the Buddhist-majority Myanmar began violently driving Rohingya Muslims from their homes – destroying and looting villages; killing men, women and children; and raping women. The campaign killed at least 6,700 Rohingya and drove as many as 650,000 into refugee camps in neighboring Bangladesh. In November of 2017, a crew from USC Shoah Foundation spent time in the camps interviewing refugees.
/ Wednesday, October 23, 2019
On the occasion of the commemoration of Kristallnacht, Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, Holocaust survivor and gifted cellist, along with her children Raphael and Maya, grandson Abraham and niece Michal, will offer an intimate glimpse inside their family history. Letters from the family archive, photographs and musical pieces tell the story of her love-filled childhood home in Breslau, the Nazis seizure of power and the subsequent fate of her family.
/ Wednesday, October 30, 2019
A public lecture by Ayşenur Korkmaz (PhD candidate in European Studies, University of Amsterdam) 2019-2020 Robert J. Katz Research Fellow in Genocide Studies Organized by the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research Cosponsored by the USC Institute of Armenian Studies
cagr / Wednesday, November 13, 2019
The Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum this month became the second in the world to install a permanent theater to display Dimensions in Testimony – an interactive, holographic project developed by USC Shoah Foundation that will allow visitors to interact with a Holocaust survivor long after they are no longer with us.
DiT, dallas, museum, Max Glauben / Sunday, October 6, 2019
When Ursula Martens was a little girl living in Germany, she was happy to be forced by law at age 10 to join the Hitler Youth.  “Everything was free,” she said. “You could go to theaters. … They would send you on vacations with other children at nice resorts.”  It wasn’t until she was a little older that she realized something was wrong.
/ Saturday, October 19, 2019
Leading up to the one-year anniversary of the deadly synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh, USC Shoah Foundation staff members trained educators in that metro area last week about how to use video testimonies of Holocaust witnesses as a tool to teach empathy, understanding and respect.
antiSemitism / Wednesday, October 30, 2019
An ISIS commander. Victims of the Cambodian and Bosnian genocides. Inmates at Guantanamo Bay. They are among the many subjects portrayed in the work of three women who spoke this week about their experiences as journalists and filmmakers working in conflict zones and with traumatized individuals on a USC Visions & Voices panel jointly organized by USC Shoah Foundation and the USC Fisher Museum of Art. 
Rohingya, collections, women, cambodia, Bosnia / Thursday, November 7, 2019
Today we mourn the loss of one of our closest friends, Branko Lustig, a Holocaust survivor and two-time Academy Award winner who produced Schindler’s List and played an indispensable role in the founding of USC Shoah Foundation. He was 87. Shortly after the film’s 1993 release, Lustig -- who witnessed horrific atrocities at Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and other concentration and labor camps -- led the drive to implement Steven Spielberg’s vision of collecting 50,000 Holocaust testimonies for what was then called Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation.
memoriam, obit, Branko Lustig / Thursday, November 14, 2019
In China, the number of people still alive who survived the 1937 Nanjing Massacre at the hands of Japanese invaders has fallen to minuscule levels – some experts put the number around 80. USC Shoah Foundation’s collection of about 100 testimonies of survivors from this rampage that killed some 300,000 civilians and unarmed soldiers includes the vast majority of them. This fall, the Institute reached a milestone: The entire collection of Nanjing testimonies has been indexed and subtitled in English.
nanjing, collections / Monday, November 18, 2019

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