Last week a group of us from USC Shoah Foundation were in Guatemala with our testimony partner, the Foundation for Forensic Anthropology in Guatemala (FAFG). We attended the funeral of a Mayan man whose remains were recently exhumed by FAFG – 36 years after he disappeared during the genocide there.
From September 11 to September 14, 2016, the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide hosted the international conference "A Conflict? Genocide and Resistance in Guatemala."

Alan Rose was repeating himself. He was stuck in a particularly difficult part of his story about being deported from a labor camp to Buchenwald Concentration Camp. Josh Turnil and the guests he had invited to hear Alan’s story in Josh’s Paris living room that January 2019 evening – about 20 people of all ages tucked into sofas and folding chairs – gently helped Alan along. After Alan had finished speaking, Josh’s teenage son sat at the piano and played a slow, jazzy melody with a repeating refrain that reflected the circularity of memory.

Genocide survivor Consolée Uwamariya learns video testimony indexing.
A handful of witnesses in the genocide trial against former Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt appear in Pamela Yates’ film “500 Years,” but her cameras captured the entire proceeding. The case is considered a landmark in human rights law.
The Institute mourns the passing of members of our community in 2021, including survivors who have given testimony Julio Botton, Fritzie Fritzshall, Eddie Jaku, Roman Kent, Rabbi Bent Melchior, Ruth Pearl, Suzy Ressler, Irving Roth, and Marcus Segal.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Susan Fitzpatrick-Behrens chairs the "Transnational Impacts of Genocide" panel

 

 

 

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Call for Papers

INoGS 9th International Conference

Genocide and Survivor Communities: Agency, Resistance, Recognition

June 23-26, 2024
University of Southern California Los Angeles

On the ancestral and unceded territory of the Tongva and Kizh Nation peoples

Annabel Carballo-Mesa is a PhD candidate at the University of Barcelona. Since January 17 she has been in Los Angeles conducting research with Visual History Archive (VHA) testimonies for a dissertation provisionally entitled “Na Bister! (Don’t Forget!) An Oral History of the Roma and Sinti Genocide”.

As we celebrate our 30th anniversary, we pay tribute to some of the people who helped build the organization.

Ita Gordon has worked as an indexer, translator, mentor, and researcher at the USC Shoah Foundation since its founding 30 years ago, channeling her passion for the organization’s mission into diligent care and helping to establish the USC Shoah Foundation as a world leader in collecting, preserving, and sharing survivor testimony.