Today marks the 84th anniversary of the Kindertransport, the rescue operation that beginning in 1938 helped nearly 10,000 Jewish children escape to the United Kingdom from Germany and Nazi-controlled territory in Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland. 

USC Shoah Foundation has partnered with a group of scholars from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem to provide them with 1,000 transcripts from the Visual History Archive for a study that will analyze Holocaust survivor testimonies.

USC Shoah Foundation–the Institute for Visual History and Education (USC Shoah Foundation) on Wednesday welcomed Second Gentleman Douglas Emhoff to the Institute’s global headquarters on the campus of the University of Southern California.  

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”.

"Research With Testimonies: Featuring the Center's 2021 Lev Student Research Fellows” Nicholas Bredie (USC PhD candidate in Literature and Creative Writing) and Atharva Tewari (USC undergraduate student, Global Studies and Journalism major) 2021 Beth and Arthur Lev Student Research Fellow  April 12, 2022

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 Phillip Maisel, who died in Melbourne, Australia on August 22 just days after celebrating his 100th birthday. Born in Vilnus (now Lithuania) in 1922, Maisel lived through forced labor camps in Estonia, Germany and Poland before emigrating to Australia and going on to record more than 1,500 testimonies of his fellow Holocaust survivors. He called each recorded testimony “a miracle” and thereby earned the nickname “the keeper of miracles.” His memoir, published last year, was called The Keeper of Miracles.

USC Shoah Foundation last week joined President Joe Biden and his wife Jill Biden for a screening of HBO’s new Holocaust film The Survivor—the first official showing of a film in the White House theater since the president assumed office.

USC Shoah Foundation is accepting applications for the highly competitive William P. Lauder Junior Internship Program that begins November 13. Since 2014, the program has provided a dynamic and unique learning opportunity for hundreds of students to engage with testimonies from survivors and witnesses of genocide.  The program is looking for 40 grade 7-11 students nationwide who are representative of diverse backgrounds and academic skills. 

Inside a Warsaw light stage surrounded by nine cameras, prominent historian and journalist Marian Turski in late June completed the first ever Polish-language interactive biography. Conducted by USC Shoah Foundation and the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw (POLIN), Turski’s interview was a truly international collaboration involving 15 team members from Belgium, Germany, Hungary, Poland, the U.K and the U.S.

The Holocaust Memorial Resource and Education Center of Florida (HMREC) has unveiled architectural renderings of the new Holocaust Museum for Hope & Humanity in Orlando, Florida that will be the world’s first Holocaust museum designed around survivor and witness testimonies. USC Shoah Foundation serves as a content and creative partner in the development of the new museum, the first time the Institute has teamed with a Holocaust Museum to design and implement a ground-up and permanent museum-wide exhibition.

USC Shoah Foundation mourns the passing of our friend Max Eisen, a Holocaust survivor who returned to Auschwitz-Birkenau more than 20 times as an educator and testified at the trials of two SS guards in 2015, more than 70 years after his entire family was killed in Nazi concentration camps. Max’s memoir, By Chance Alone: A Remarkable True Story of Courage and Survival at Auschwitz, was the 2019 winner of Canada Reads, a Canadian Broadcasting Company “battle of the books” program, and was shortlisted for the RBC Taylor Prize in 2017. 

For weeks, Eva (Geiringer) Schloss and a small band of young women had been exploring the far corners of the women’s section of Auschwitz-Birkenau, alone and, for the first time in months, unwatched. It was January 1945, and Allied forces were nearing the camp. The SS had already evacuated most of the surviving inmates by way of middle-of-the-night marches in freezing temperatures. The gas chambers and crematoria had been destroyed. The SS guards had fled.

USC Shoah Foundation and Discovery Education today launched the fourth annual Stronger Than Hate Challenge offering students the opportunity to win $10,000 in prizes. The challenge encourages students aged 13-18 in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada to work individually or in groups of 2-4 on multimedia projects that demonstrate the power of story to create a community that is stronger than hate.

The USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research is proud to announce its cooperation with a German government funded multi-institutional Holocaust research project entitled #LastSeen - Pictures of Nazi Deportations.

Our longtime friend Pinchas Gutter turns 90 today! The survivor of six German Nazi concentration camps has shared his remarkable story with USC Shoah Foundation in a variety of formats over the years, including as a Dimensions in Testimony interactive biography that has been featured by media outlets including CBS 60 Minutes and the New York Times. Earlier this year Pinchas sat down with us to reflect on contemporary events and his experiences. 

USC Shoah Foundation has moved into the next chapter of its work, with noted international expert and governmental advisor on Holocaust remembrance and antisemitism Dr. Robert Williams appointed as Andrew J. and Erna Finci Viterbi Executive Director.

USC Shoah Foundation worked closely with The Survivor team to bring the important film to the screen and received a production credit. Assistance included providing access to Haft’s and other survivors’ testimonies in the Visual History Archive, and consulting with the producers to ensure historical accuracy. Crispin Brooks is curator of the Visual History Archive and over the years has played a key role in archiving its testimonies. He is also immersed in Eastern European studies. He spoke to us about consulting on The Survivor.

When Lee Liberman first viewed testimonies from USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive (VHA) almost 25 years ago, she was immediately moved to action. “We have a commitment and duty to humanity to combat hate, and we must work diligently to bring these testimonies to communities around the globe,” she said. More than two decades later, as Lee transitions to an emeritus role after a successful term as Chair of the Institute’s Board of Councilors, she has more than delivered on her pledge.

July 4 is Kwibohora, also known as Rwanda Liberation Day. On this day in 1994 the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) secured the capital of Kigali and ended the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda. To commemorate Kwibohora, we spoke to three genocide survivors now residing in the United States.

  Call for Applications from Senior Scholars   2023-2024 Center Research Fellowship Deadline: January 31, 2023  

Rena Quint has worked hard to find a balance between moving beyond memory and living inside of it, between yearning to know—and have proof of—where she came from and what she lost, but of not wanting to be defined by it.

Today we remember the lives lost at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh on October 27, 2018. The Shabbat morning attack, in which 11 worshippers were killed and six wounded—including several Holocaust survivors—was the deadliest act of antisemitic violence in United States history. Synagogue member Judah Samet, a Hungarian-born survivor of the Holocaust, sat trapped in his car in the synagogue parking lot that Saturday morning as law enforcement agents engaged in a gun battle with the shooter.

California Governor Gavin Newsom recently declared that Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day—observed annually on April 24—will become a statewide holiday to be known as Genocide Awareness Day.

  Call for Applications from PhD Candidates   Greenberg Research Fellowship USC Shoah Foundation Katz Research Fellowship in Genocide Studies

 

A powerful documentary that hinges on USC Shoah Foundation testimony raises difficult questions about how Hungary memorializes victims of the Nazi occupation and confronts its own role in wartime atrocities. Released last year, filmmaker Dániel Ács’ Monument to the Murderers recounts the controversy surrounding a monument erected in Budapest in 2005 to honor local victims of World War II.

Robert Widerman Clary was among the first 100 Holocaust survivors interviewed for USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive, and he conducted 75 interviews of other survivors. In his testimony, he talks about his instinct and talent for entertaining—honed while he was a child in Paris—saved and shaped his life.

Making DiT accessible at no-cost to educators and students through IWitness provides students anywhere in the world with the opportunity to have a conversational experience with survivors of the Holocaust and other witnesses to history. And at the Holocaust & Genocide Centres in Johannesburg and Durban, that’s exactly what students did, with a total of 400 learners interfacing with an interactive recorded video of Pinchas, a Jewish survivor of six Nazi concentration camps.

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.