Public lecture by Gabór Tóth (University of Oxford, History)
2018-2019 Center Postdoctoral Research Fellow
In the 1980s, a tiny woman in her 50s named Ruth Westheimer shocked and delighted the world with her blunt advice – delivered in a grandmotherly German accent – about sex. She became a media sensation and remains a household name as “Dr. Ruth.”
Less known is her perilous journey to get there – a story that includes her survival of the Holocaust and immigration to British-controlled Mandatory Palestine, where she briefly became a sniper in a Jewish paramilitary force.
Hannah Lessing represents Austrian society’s desire to atone. Her unique job involves, among other things, tracking down Austrian Holocaust survivors or their kin – inside the country and out – to offer financial reparations.
Lessing, the secretary general of the National Fund of the Republic of Austria for Victims of National Socialism, came to USC Shoah Foundation this week to discuss a potential collaborative project with the Institute.
Leading up to the one-year anniversary of the deadly synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh, USC Shoah Foundation staff members trained educators in that metro area last week about how to use video testimonies of Holocaust witnesses as a tool to teach empathy, understanding and respect.
Today we mourn the loss of one of our closest friends, Branko Lustig, a Holocaust survivor and two-time Academy Award winner who produced Schindler’s List and played an indispensable role in the founding of USC Shoah Foundation. He was 87.
Shortly after the film’s 1993 release, Lustig -- who witnessed horrific atrocities at Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and other concentration and labor camps -- led the drive to implement Steven Spielberg’s vision of collecting 50,000 Holocaust testimonies for what was then called Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation.
USC Shoah Foundation —The Institute for Visual History and Education (USC Shoah Foundation) and Fox Searchlight Pictures today announced a partnership to develop classroom curriculum tied to JOJO RABBIT, Taika Waititi’s heartfelt World War II anti-hate satire.
Maël LeNoc, a PhD Candidate in Geography at Texas State University, has been awarded the 2019-2020 Margee and Douglas Greenberg Research Fellowship at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research.
USC Shoah Foundation is saddened by the recent loss of Eva Kor, a Holocaust survivor who – along with her twin sister – endured cruel experiments conducted on her at Auschwitz, and, half a century later, sparked controversy by publicly forgiving the Nazis who tormented her and killed her parents and two older sisters.
She went on to found CANDLES Museum and Education Center in Indiana.
Miriam Katin survived the Holocaust as a toddler because her quick-thinking mother faked their deaths in Budapest at a historically perilous time for Jews in Hungary. Now 77, Katin has a thriving career as a graphic artist whose humor cartoons have appeared in The New Yorker.
Her remarkable oral history would have been lost to time without the initiative by USC Shoah Foundation to document the stories of Holocaust survivors before it is too late.