Gabór M. Tóth, a postdoctoral associate currently completing a dual fellowship at the Yale University Digital Humanities Lab and the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, has been awarded the 2018-2019 Center Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research. This fellowship provides support to an outstanding postdoctoral scholar from any discipline who will advance digital genocide research through the use of the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive (VHA).

Lukas Meissel, a PhD candidate in Holocaust Studies at the University of Haifa, Israel, has been awarded the 2018-2019 Greenberg Research Fellowship at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research. Meissel will be in residence at the Center for one month in early Spring 2019 to conduct research in the Visual History Archive for his doctoral dissertation, entitled “SS-Photography in Concentration Camps. Genres and Meanings of Erkennungsdienst-Photos.”

Bieke Van Camp, a PhD candidate in Contemporary History at University Paul-Valéry, Montpellier (France), has been awarded the 2018-2019 Robert J. Katz Research Fellowship at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research. Van Camp will be in residence at the Center in April 2019 in order to conduct research in the Visual History Archive to contribute to her doctoral dissertation, “The Shoah as a Social Experience and the Deportees as Social Groups. Socio-historical Comparative Approach to Italian and Dutch-Speaking Deportees.”

Danielle Willard-Kyle, a PhD candidate in History at Rutgers University, has been awarded the 2018-2019 Center Graduate Research Fellowship at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research. Willard-Kyle will be in residence at the Center from mid-March to mid-April 2019 to conduct research for a chapter of her doctoral dissertation, “Living in Liminal Spaces: Refugees in Italian Displaced Persons Camps, 1945-1951.”

On August 2, 1944, nearly 3,000 Roma and Sinti women, men and children were murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Herman Shine describes the many close calls he and a friend faced when he escaped from the Auschwitz concentration camp complex. It was a perilous journey, but he became one of the very few prisoners to make it out of the camp alive.

As he described in the testimony he gave to USC Shoah Foundation in 1997, it was one stroke of luck after another that allowed Herman Shine to become one of only a few hundred people to escape the Auschwitz death camp.