USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education was founded to capture the voices, emotions and faces of those who suffered, yet miraculously survived the most heinous crime ever committed against humanity by humanity.

The idea was to record individual and collective memories that would be preserved in perpetuity as a seminal educational tool to inform current and future generations that incitement, hate and violence against a person or a group can ultimately lead to death, genocide and ultimately extermination.

Jewish survivor Felix Flicker joined the Soviet Armed Forces in 1943. Flicker recalls arriving at Majdanek concentration camp after it was liberated in July 1944. He describes the prisoners looking like skeletons and the arrests and executions of the camp guards.

On August 2nd, 1944 the Zigeunerlager (known as the Gypsy famliy camp) in Auschwitz- Birkeanau was liquidated and about 3,000 Sinti and Roma men, women and children were sent to the gas chambers. In honor of the Sinti and Roma victims in the Holocaust, survivors Wladyslaw Gunman, Anna Kwiatkowska and Marianna Koniak speak about their experiences with discrimination, restrictions, deportations and mass murder.

A group of men is placed in several trucks. They are driven through the streets and out of town into an open area surrounded by trees. They are beaten around the head with rifle butts, made to run in a group towards an open mass grave. A mere handful of armed guards make them lie in the grave like sardines. Then they are shot one by one in broad daylight.

The horrific spectacle, highly reminiscent of the Nazi Einsatzgruppen Aktions in the Soviet Union in 1941, was, in fact, the mass murder of some 30 men that took place in Iraq just this week. 

July 24, 2014: Harry Reicher, Professor of Law at University of Pennsylvania and USC Shoah Foundation's inaugural Rutman Teaching Fellow, utilized his fellowship to collect Holocaust survivor testimony content he could utilize in his classes, which currently make liberal use of multimedia content.

Featuring historical footage, Nazi propaganda film, modern cinema clips, and Visual History Archive testimony, Reicher's lecture provided an overview of the Nazi legal system and demonstrated the value of film in teaching this subject.

Leo Hymas, United States Armed Forces and Buchenwald camp liberator speaks only for the second time in his life about a particular combat operation in Düsseldorf, Germany. This testimony clip was featured in the lesson, Heroes, from Teaching with Testimony in the 21st Century.

Ingrid Alexovics is the head of the Foreign Language Department at Radnóti Miklós Economic Secondary School in Pécs, Hungary. She holds a master’s degree in English Language and Literature from the Faculty of Arts, University of Pécs. She has taught English as a foreign language and English for specific purposes for over 20 years to high school students and adults. She worked as a Fulbright exchange teacher in Atlantic City High School, New Jersey during the academic year of 2009/2010.