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.

Beginning November 1, 2022, in observance of Native American Heritage Month in the United States, the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research shared one video per day from our recent international conference "Mass Violence and Its Lasting Impact on Indigenous Peoples - The Case of the Americas and Australia/Pacific Region," which was held at the University of Southern California, on the ancestral and unceded territory of the Tongva and Kizh Nation peoples.

At USC for Trojan Family Weekend? Come visit us at Leavey Library! Search the 55,000 testimonies in our Visual History Archive with the help of trained staff. Find out about student internship opportunities.

Join USC Shoah Foundation and The Leichtag Foundation for a dialogue between film producers and scholars, Konstantin Fam, Clint Burkett, Alan Markowitz, Kori Street and Jacqueline S. Gmach

Through the lens of their testimony as part of the “If You Heard What I Heard” docuseries produced by Carolyn Siegel, the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors will share their experiences of growing up with first hand accounts of the atrocities of the Holocaust.

Download video Download Host Kit   About Kurt Thomas Kurt Thomas was born in the city of Brno, Czechoslovakia, in 1914. He grew up in Boskovice, a small town with a famous medieval Jewish quarter. Kurt was drafted into the Czechoslovak Army, where he received military training.

Download video Download Host Kit   About Erika Gold Erika Gold was born in Germany on January 4, 1928. She was five years old when Hitler came to power.

Descargar video Descargar Kit   Sobre Elie Alevy Elie Alevy nació en Salónica, Grecia en 1926 en el seno de una familia judía de clase media. Tenía dos hermanas mayores.

Download video Download Host Kit   About Dr. Edith Eger Edith Eger was born in 1927 in Kosice, (then Czechoslovakia, later Hungary, now Slovakia) to Hungarian Jewish parents. She had two sisters.

Download video Download Host Kit  

Download video Download Home Kit יוסף באו נולד ב 18- ביוני 1920 בקרקוב, שבפולין. כשהיה בן 18 התחיל ללמוד אמנות פלסטית באוניברסיטת קרקוב, אך מלחמת העולם השנייה קטעה את לימודיו. בתחילה הועבר יחד עם שאר יהודי העיר לגטו קרקוב ולאחר מכן למחנה הריכוז פלאשוב, במחנה זה הכיר את אשתו רבקה והם התחתנו בסתר בתוך מחנה הנשים.

Download video Download Host Kit   About Yehudah Bakon Yehudah Bakon was born in Moravska Ostrava (Czechoslovakia) on July 28, 1929.

Kurt describes liberating survivors of a death march in May 1945, in Volary, Czechoslovakia, including his first encounter with his future wife, Gerda. Kurt Klein was born July 2, 1920, in Walldorf, Germany. As the Nazi persecution of German Jews intensified, Kurt’s parents decided to send him and his siblings to live with distant relatives in Buffalo, New York, where he worked in various jobs, including the printing business, trying to raise enough money to bring his parents to the United States. Kurt was drafted into the United States Army in 1943.

Trained as a historian of modern Europe in USC’s History Department, Clark comes to the Shoah Foundation from MIT, where she has been the Faculty Director of MIT’s Programs in the Digital Humanities.

In 2022, USC Shoah Foundation integrated first testimonies of survivors and witnesses of the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, with a particular emphasis on the 1995 genocide in Srebrenica. The integration is the result of the Institute’s partnership with the Srebrenica Memorial Center.

Cynthia Schirmer currently oversees the finances and business operations of the Institute. She has worked for the Shoah Foundation since March 2016. Prior to that, Cynthia worked as the Shoah Foundation’s Business Officer (while employed at the Dornsife Business Office) from December 2013 thru December 2015. Cynthia has a Master’s degree in Business Administration from the University of La Verne, and a Bachelor’s degree in Economics with a minor in Computer Science from Cal State Fullerton.

Rachel Peacock has a B.S. in Telecommunications Production from University of Florida's College of Journalism and Communications. She has eight years of professional experience in educational video production, broadcast production, and project management. Rachel manages scheduling and production for new testimonies conducted by USC Shoah Foundation for the Holocaust and Countering Antisemitism Through Testimony (CATT) Collections.

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.

On the afternoon of January 27, 1945, the Red Army liberated Auschwitz, a complex of concentration and extermination camps. Although most of the prisoners were sent on a death march before the Soviet troops arrived, around 7,000 still remained at Auschwitz. The date of the liberation is recognized by the United Nations as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

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.

Noah joined the USC Shoah Foundation in 2021 as Associate Director of Annual Giving and began his role as Director of Development in 2024. He is responsible for content development, strategy, and general annual fund progress, as well as working with community members at an individual level to grow their engagement. Before joining the Institute’s advancement team, Noah worked in annual giving at Caltech and UCLA and graduated from the University of Michigan.

In this clip from her 2019 interview with the USC Shoah Foundation, Ivy Schamis, an educator at Parkland High School, stresses the value of Holocaust education. More on Ivy Schamis Listen to Ivy reflect on the importance of reaching out after an act of violence. Explore our IWitness activity, Bonding Through Adversity.

Sam Gustman has been chief technology officer (CTO) of the Shoah Foundation since 1994. Gustman is also associate dean and CTO at the USC Libraries where he oversees IT for the Libraries and started the USC Digital Repository.

Jenna Leventhal is the Senior Director of Administration at USC Shoah Foundation. She earned a BA in history from UC Santa Barbara and an MA in public history from University of Houston, with an emphasis in Holocaust education and oral history.

Dr. Robert J. Williams is the Chief Executive Officer and Finci-Viterbi Chair of the USC Shoah Foundation. He is UNESCO Chair on Antisemitism and Holocaust Research and the Advisor to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, where he also served for four years as chair of the Committee on Antisemitism and Holocaust Denial.

Approximately 200,000 Holocaust survivors are living around the world today, most of whom are in their 80s and 90s. The world needs to hear their stories now. We have accelerated an urgent effort to capture as many testimonies as possible before the last of the remaining Holocaust survivors leave us.

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.