On a Wednesday morning in New York in the fall of 2021, Rabbi Nicole Auerbach greeted Walter and Phyllis Loeb in Central Synagogue’s majestic sanctuary. She led them through the arch-lined nave, past row after row of pews, beyond the six sets of capital columns wrapped in colorful, gold-accented reliefs, all the way up to the intricately carved Mahagony bima, the stage where the synagogue’s rabbi and cantor preside over Shabbat and holiday services.

For much of their life, Allen and Peter Adamson didn't know that Joe, their easy-going, suburbanite dad, a VP at a New York plastics company, had a remarkable early history. He had escaped Germany at the age of 14 on the Kindertransport, served as an interrogator with the U.S. Army during the liberation of Mauthausen Concentration Camp, and helped in a U.S. effort to intercept secret messages encoded in German postage stamps.

"Reclaiming the 'Ruins of Memory': Gender, Agency, and Imagination in Stories of the Shoah” Sara R. Horowitz  (York University, Canada)  2020-2021 Sara and Asa Shapiro Scholar in Residence  March 23, 2022

In a five-hour interview with USC Shoah Foundation, Justus Rosenberg refers to himself as “small fry,” “a cog,” an unimportant person. And perhaps it was for this reason that for decades, the Bard College literature professor hadn’t let on—to his colleagues, to his students, and even, for a time, to his own wife—that he had fought and outwitted the Nazis during World War II to save thousands from persecution.

Sally (Fink) Singer still cries over the spilled milk. Yes, it happened more than 80 years ago. And at the age of 100, Sally knows that her siblings – Anne (99), Sol (97), and Ruth (95), who to this day remain inseparable – have long since forgiven her. But the pangs of guilt and hunger linger.

To commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day, USC Shoah Foundation, The Willesden Project, and The Conscious Kid today launch a video read-along of Hold on to Your Music, the children’s book telling the story of Lisa Jura, a young Holocaust survivor who in 1938 escaped from Vienna on the Kindertransport and went on to become an acclaimed pianist in the United Kingdom.

East Coast dance artist Rachel Linsky combines movement and testimony to create a novel form of Holocaust education.  Rachel directs and choreographs ZACHOR, an initiative that honors Holocaust survivors through dance. Her latest work in the project is Hidden, a dance film and production based on the story of Aaron Elster, a Jewish boy who from 1943 to 1945 hid from Nazi persecution in the attic of a Polish family. 

Earlier this year, thanks to a new collaboration with the Srebrenica Memorial Center, USC Shoah Foundation took possession of a pilot collection of 20 testimonies of survivors and witnesses of the 1995 genocide in Srebrenica, Bosnia-Herzegovina. The testimonies document the genocide of more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim (Bosniak) men and boys and the deportation of over 25,000 women and children that occurred in parts of eastern Bosnia-Herzegovina during the 1992-1995 war.

More than 18,000 students and 250 teachers from school districts across Georgia last week experienced famed pianist Mona Golabek's livestreamed performance adapted from her acclaimed book, The Children of Willesden Lane. Produced in an exciting new format by Discovery Education in partnership with USC Shoah Foundation, the special theatrical and musical Willesden READS event gave students and educators the opportunity to interact with Mona as she brought to life the inspiring story of her mother and Holocaust survivor, Lisa Jura. 

As the world watches in horror as millions of Ukrainians resist, take shelter or flee from Russian attacks, news reports stir up connections to a haunting past. We scanned our Visual History Archive to bring just a few stories from these places to light. The words of survivors, as they often do, reach forward through time.

USC Shoah Foundation and the Museum of Jewish Heritage are joining forces on July 12 to host the official New York City premiere of My Name Is Sara, a feature film based on the true story of a young girl’s survival during the Holocaust while hiding in plain sight in the Ukrainian countryside. Produced in association with USC Shoah Foundation, the film was an Official Selection at over 50 festivals internationally, taking home five Best Feature Awards. Strand Releasing will bring the movie to New York theatres on July 13, 2022 and nationwide beginning July 22, 2022.

Hundreds of survivors of the 1994 Rwandan Genocide against the Tutsi congregated in Salt Lake City over the weekend for the largest-ever international gathering of survivors. Organizers say the event, hosted by IBUKA-USA and supported by a number of organizations including USC Shoah Foundation, was a safe space for survivors to discuss issues including bringing genocide perpetrators to justice, preserving the memory of victims, and fighting against revisionism.

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.

The pages of my copy of The Giver are totally worn. The cover has been folded and there are subsequent pages with the same type of tear. On the bottom right corner is an advertisement for a special low price of $2.99 and in the upper right corner there is the embedded medal of the John Newbery Prize, one of the most prestigious prizes in literature.

Modern day Kentucky and WWII-era Austria may seem worlds apart, but the far-flung locales and distant timeframes came together last month at a series of educational workshops at the Iroquois Branch Library in south Louisville. Over the course of five weeks, a group of young children and their caregivers gathered each Saturday morning for a special educational series sponsored by the National Center for Families Learning (NCFL) and The Willesden Project, a program of USC Shoah Foundation and Hold On To Your Music Foundation, with support from the Koret Foundation. 

USC Shoah Foundation today launches its 500th IWitness activity with release of In Lisa's Footsteps, a primary level IWalk based on Mona Golabek’s acclaimed The Children of Willesden Lane books. In Lisa's Footsteps tells the story of Golabek’s mother, Lisa Jura, a young Holocaust survivor who in 1938 escaped from Vienna to London on the Kindertransport.

Two USC scholars – graduate students Emily Geminder and Vaclav Masek - will share the Beth and Arthur Lev Student Research Fellowship for Summer 2022.

USC Shoah Foundation is bringing The Willesden Project educational initiative to a group of 500 Ukrainian refugees and other guests in Warsaw, Poland this weekend. The event will also feature a musical performance by USC Shoah Foundation partner and celebrated pianist Mona Golabek.

USC Shoah Foundation mourns the passing of Edward Mosberg, a Holocaust survivor whose passion for sharing his story through lectures, recorded interviews, and educational trips back to concentration camps in Europe taught and inspired people everywhere. He was 96.

Fifteen hours of interviews describing the actions of a group of World War II-era diplomats who defied official policies to save tens of thousands of lives during the Holocaust have been added to USC Shoah Foundation’s 55,000-strong Visual History Archive (VHA) thanks to a collaboration with the Andrew J. & Joyce D. Mandell Family Foundation.

"It’s very important that the Swedish Holocaust Museum is one of Sweden’s National Historical Museums. We believe the Holocaust is not a Jewish concern, but that it is, and must be, a universal one." Lizzie Oved Scheja (pictured above, full interview below), founder and director of J! Jewish Culture in Sweden, speaking earlier this month after Swedish Minister of Culture Jeanette Gustafsdotter inaugurated the country’s first museum dedicated to preserving and perpetuating the memory of the Holocaust.

USC Shoah Foundation mourns the passing of our friend Vera Gissing, who died March 12 in Berkshire, England at age 93. Vera will be remembered for her extraordinary life, which included escaping Prague in 1939 on one of the last Kindertransport trains to make it out of Czechoslovakia before the outbreak of World War II.

Holocaust survivor and USC Shoah Foundation friend Max Eisen passed away earlier this month, leaving a unique legacy forged by harrowing wartime experiences, 20 return trips to Auschwitz-Birkenau as an educator, and the testimony he gave against two SS guards in Germany beginning in 2015.

The Institute mourns the passing of members of our community in 2022, including survivors who have given testimony, Joe Adamson, Helen Fagin, Sigmund Burke, Vera Gissing, Gerda Weissmann Klein, Bill Harvey, Max Glauben, Max Eisen, Phillip Maisel, Edward Mosberg, Judah Samet and Robert Clary.

Today is International Women’s Day and this year we are honoring girls—from Holocaust Europe to Africa, from Central America to the Middle East, from occupied China to pre-war Armenia—who demonstrated extraordinary strength and resilience in the face of unimaginable horrors. Here is a selection of USC Shoah Foundation clips and films to mark the occasion.

USC Shoah Foundation today launches a series of professional development webinars that provide educators with testimony-based resources that support accelerated learning practices across the curriculum. The focus on accelerated learning comes as schools return to in-person instruction and teachers navigate the range of learning losses caused by the need for remote schooling during the Covid-19 pandemic.

July 11 marks 26 years since the Srebrenica genocide, the biggest in a cluster of massacres that occurred as part of the campaign of ethnic cleansing in eastern parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina during the 1992-1995 war in the country. It’s the day in 1995 that Bosnian Serb forces led by General Ratko Mladic overran the enclave of Srebrenica, the town in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina the United Nations had formally designated as a “safe area” in 1993. 

How best to fuse compelling testimony with the latest innovative technologies to produce the most effective instructional materials for students and educators around the world?

Eighty-one years ago today Nazi soldiers and their collaborators committed one of the largest single massacres of the Holocaust with the murder of close to 33,000 Jews in the Babyn Yar ravine in Ukraine. The site of the atrocity on the outskirts of the capital Kyiv is now a memorial that people anywhere can visit with a new Virtual IWalk released by USC Shoah Foundation earlier this year. 

USC Shoah Foundation with its partner the Schindler’s Ark Foundation has added a tour of Oskar Schindler’s former factory in what is now the Czech Republic to its mobile IWalk application, enabling smartphone users to explore the site where the German businessman sheltered more than 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust.