USC Shoah foundation is saddened to learn of the recent passing of Anneliese Nossbaum, who survived a Jewish ghetto and three concentration camps. Anneliese passed away March 23, 2020 after falling ill within weeks of returning from a trip that commemorated the 75-year anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. She was 91. She was born on January 8, 1929 in Guben, Germany as Anneliese Winterberg.  At the age of two, her family moved to Bonn where her father later became the rabbi of their synagogue.  

Only a day after the University of Southern California announced that it would conduct a three-day test to move all classes online, which soon turned into a permanent arrangement until the end of Spring semester, my colleague and I gave our last in-person introduction to the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive to a USC class. Perhaps serendipitously, one of the topics discussed in this class was physical health.

Peter Hayes is Professor Emeritus of History and German and Theodore Zev Weiss Holocaust Educational Foundation Professor Emeritus of Holocaust Studies at Northwestern University and a former chair of the Academic Committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Among his thirteen books are The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies (co-edited with John K. Roth), How Was It Possible? A Holocaust Reader, and Why? Explaining the Holocaust, which also has appeared in German and Spanish translations and shortly will be in Chinese, Polish, and Slovak, as well.

I much enjoyed my stay at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research in early March, just before the pandemic turned all of our lives upside down. Meeting the wonderful members of the staff and seeing how much the operations of both the Foundation and the Center have grown since my last visit in 2014 were remarkable experiences.

  “Geographies of Persecution in Occupied Paris: Place and Space in Survivors' Testimonies” Maël Le Noc (PhD Candidate in Geography, Texas State University) 2019-2020 Margee and Douglas Greenberg Research Fellow March 12, 2020  

  “Makeshift Murder: The Holocaust at Its Peak” Peter Hayes (Northwestern University) 2019-2020 Shapiro Scholar in Residence March 5, 2020