Barnabas Balint, a PhD candidate at Magdalen College at the University of Oxford, UK, has been awarded the 2021-2022 Breslauer, Rutman, and Anderson Research Fellowship at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research. He will be in residence at the Center during Spring 2022 in order to conduct research for his dissertation, which is entitled “Accelerated Development into Adulthood: The Changing Roles of Young Hungarians During the Holocaust.”

“Redress for Linguistic Genocide in Canada” Lorena Sekwan Fontaine (University of Winnipeg/San Diego State University) February 17, 2022

(Join us in person for this lecture or attend virtually on Zoom)  Organized by the USC Max Kade Institute for Austrian-German-Swiss Studies Cosponsored by the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research  RSVP Here   COVID-19 Health and Safety

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.

Emiliia Kessler grew up in Khmel'nik, then part of Soviet Ukraine. She recalls the complex tensions between the Russians, the Ukrainians and the Jewish community that were part of everyday life in the 1930s. Related With Ukraine under attack, we stand by our programmatic partners in Ukraine and Russia working to  build more tolerant communities.

Alex Redner was 11 years old when the German army began bombarding his hometown of Lviv (then Lwow) on Sept. 1, 1939. Less than three weeks later, the Red Army occupied the city. Related With Ukraine under attack, we stand by our programmatic partners in Ukraine and Russia working to  build more tolerant communities.

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.

Two weeks into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, USC Shoah Foundation is extremely concerned for its partners, survivors and friends in both countries and strongly condemns the senseless loss of life. USC Shoah Foundation has strong roots in Ukraine, having conducted 3,432 interviews in the country that form the basis for a collection of testimony-based educational programs that have reached tens of thousands of Ukrainian teachers and students.

In recounting the past, Holocaust survivors deliberately or unconsciously craft the stories they recount about the Shoah. Whether through literature, memoirs, or testimony, survivors shape stories about the past while signaling what remains unsaid. Deferred memories – stories told many decades after the events occurred – often address issues that survivors did not dare or could not bear to recount earlier. Looking at these deferred stories through the lens of gender, we will explore how survivors craft accounts that insist on reclaiming, owning, and interpreting what the writer Ida Fink called “the ruins of memory,” often against the grain and in tension with academic interpretation.

The Starling Lab for Data Integrity (Starling Lab) today announced its inaugural class of Starling Journalism research fellows. The annual fellowship helps leading journalists from around the world use the latest advances in cryptography and Web3 technologies to protect the integrity and safety of digital content, as well as individuals working in and around the media. In an era of rampant mis- and disinformation, this timely program will apply in-field research to explore how to restore trust in digital media and underscore the legacy values of journalism.

USC Shoah Foundation mourns the passing of Holocaust survivor and accomplished structural engineer Sigmund Burke, who died February 6, 2022 at nearly 98 years old. He recorded his testimony with USC Shoah Foundation in 2019, at the age of 95, as part of the Last Chance Testimony Collection initiative, USC Shoah Foundation’s race-against-time effort to record the stories and perspectives of the last remaining Holocaust survivors.

Through a partnership with Zikaron BaSalon, we invite you to host your friends and family at an intimate gathering. We will provide you with an abridged testimony, educational material, discussion prompts, and hosting tips to create an event that will inspire your guests and move them to action – maybe even to host their own gatherings in the future.

USC Shoah Foundation is now accepting applications for rising 8th–12th grade students across the country to participate in its highly competitive week-long summer program, Leadership Workshop – Action and Values.

In 2018, USC Shoah Foundation launched an Initiative to address requests from survivors who, for complex and often very personal reasons, could not come forward in the 1990s. Since the start of COVID, the foundation has received more than 400 requests from survivors to record their testimonies. We believe there are thousands more who want to tell their stories. 

USC Shoah Foundation mourns the passing of our friend Helen Fagin, who has passed away in Sarasota, Florida at age 104. A Holocaust survivor, English professor and director of Judaic Studies at the University of Miami, Helen received numerous awards over her long career for her work in promoting tolerance, and in 1994 was invited by President Clinton to be on the advisory board for the World War II Memorial.

It was not easy for the more than 52,000 Holocaust survivors and witnesses in our Visual History Archive to tell their stories. But they did it, because they understood the importance of preserving these painful memories for future generations. We are those future generations, and it is our turn to carry their stories and messages of strength and resilience forward.

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. 

Dr. Edith Eger, Auschwitz survivor and psychologist, describes the internal work she has engaged in to move past her experiences, and to share her experiences with others.

Dr. Edith Eger, Auschwitz survivor and psychologist, describes the power of passing her story on to future generations.  

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.

Join acclaimed pianist and author Mona Golabek for a 50-minute livestreamed performance adapted from her best-selling book, The Children of Willesden Lane. This special theatrical and musical Willesden READS event gives New England students and educators the opportunity to interact with Mona as she brings to life the inspiring story of her mother, Lisa Jura, a young Holocaust survivor who in 1938 escaped from Vienna to London on the Kindertransport. More than one million students around the world have experienced the Willesden READS program to date.

Learn how you can be part of the inaugural cohort of USC’s new MA in Global Security Studies Program, starting in Fall 2022. Meet with leading international relations, global security and geospatial science faculty experts as they discuss the curriculum and opportunities for multi-faceted individuals to develop and implement creative and effective policies that address complex challenges such as environmental vulnerability, public health crises, food and resource scarcity, regional conflict, cyber-attacks and other natural and manmade causes of human insecurity.

USC Shoah Foundation continues to record interviews with Holocaust survivors as part of the Last Chance Testimony Collection initiative, an urgent effort to give voice to survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust with the goal of educating people around the globe.

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.

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?

In this clip from her testimony, Erika Gold recalls her fond memories of her favorite room in her childhood house, the living room, especially during Shabbat.

William (“Bill”) Harvey, a friend of the institute who survived two Nazi concentration camps, later became a well-known cosmetologist with a client list that included Judy Garland, Zsa Zsa Gabor, and a young Liza Minnelli.

USC Shoah Foundation mourns the loss of the Holocaust survivor and recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, who passed away on April 3, 2022. She was 97.

Leadership Workshop - Action and Values, presented by USC Shoah Foundation's William P. Lauder Junior Internship Program, provides a dynamic and unique opportunity for students to engage with testimonies – personal stories – from survivors and witnesses of genocide to develop a stronger sense of self and voice.