Watching testimony and participating in the Student Voices Film Contest helped Mariana Aguilar heal from an experience with racism.

Summary:

Free and open to the public, monthly Institute visits give guests a chance to explore the life stories of survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust and other genocides and to discover how their memories are being used to overcome prejudice, intolerance, and bigotry.

Description:

A group of dedicated USC students is reviving the Shoah Foundation Institute Student Association (SFISA).

Giulia Spizzichino, who gave her testimony in Italian on March 25, 1998, speaks about the Ardeatine Caves Massacre that took place outside Rome on March 24, 1944. In one of the worst massacres in Italy during World War II, over 300 Italian men were shot, in retaliation for an attack on SS personnel by resistance fighters. The previous day, the Patriotic Action Group (Gruppi d'Azione Patriotica, or GAP) set off a bomb that killed 33 German soldiers marching on Via Rassella. Hitler made an order that within 24 hours, 10 Italians were to be shot for each dead German.

Gerda describes being liberated by the United States Army and encountering her future husband, U.S. Army Lt. Kurt Klein, in Volary, Czechoslovakia, in May 1945. Gerda Klein was born Gerda Weissmann on May 8, 1924, in Bielsko, Poland. Gerda and her brother, Arthur, grew up relatively unaware of the spread of Nazism, until Poland was invaded in 1939; soon after, Arthur was taken away on a transport. In April 1942, Gerda and her parents were ordered into the Bielsko ghetto.

Board members, senior staff and other supporters of USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education are traveling throughout Hungary and Poland this week on the Institute’s mission to Eastern Europe.

Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest is now the second Visual History Archive access site in Hungary and the 45th in the world.

A budapesti Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem Magyarországon a második és a világon a 45. hozzáférési pont, ahonnan a Vizuális Történelmi Archívum összes interjúja elérhető. Az első hozzáférési pont 2oo9-ben nyílt meg a Közép-európai Egyetemen (CEU).

Sol Liber explains his involvement as a resistance fighter during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which took place beginning April 16, 1943. Along with his fellow ghetto inhabitant, Hakiva Leifer, he fought in the Warsaw ghetto until his capture and eventual deportation to the Treblinka II Death Camp, Poland, in May 1943.

Ernest James speaks of his participation as a United States soldier in the battle for Aachen, Germany, in October 1944. He explains how the United States armed forces surrounded Aachen and forced the German armed forces to surrender. It was October 21, 1944.