USC Shoah Foundation and the Maimonides Institute for Medicine, Ethics and the Holocaust are partnering to develop new and innovative educational programing on medical ethics and the Holocaust.

The Holocaust marked a profound and sadistic deviation from traditional notions of medical ethics, with medical and scientific communities in the Third Reich actively participating in the labeling, persecution and eventual mass murder of millions deemed “unfit.”

During the month of April, as we observe commemoration days for four genocides, we take the opportunity to raise awareness about all genocides, including those being perpetrated today. April is an opportunity for those committed to history and remembrance to alert others to the moral and physical dangers of denying the past and of ignoring atrocities occurring in our own times. Access events, educational resources, and other opportunities to commemorate the victims of genocide.

In 2018, under the initiative of the Yale Library’s Fortunoff Video Archive, three leading institutions holding large collections of Holocaust testimonies agreed to make a portion of their materials available as transcripts, along with a subset of video recordings, in Let Them Speak / In Search of the Drowned: Testimonies and Testimonial Fragments of the Holocaust (LTS). LTS is a searchable digital anthology of testimonies which examines survivor experiences and uses them to understand the experiences of those who did not survive. It is also a dynamic monograph with essays by Dr.

“Speaking About Sexuality: Male Jewish Intimacy and Agency in Oral History Interviews”

Florian Zabransky (PhD candidate at the Weidenfeld Institute–Centre for German-Jewish Studies at University of Sussex, UK)

2020-2021 Margee and Douglas Greenberg Research Fellow

April 6, 2021

Now, many (many) months into this fight against Covid-19, it feels like we are rewriting our own story. It is like our obsession with separation has been viewed in a new lens, a wider one. The stories we are now drawn to are those of connections, even if experienced by individuals who are thousands of miles apart. And, once again, when digging into the Visual History Archive for stories of the past that exemplify this idea, there is no shortage of testimonies to lean on. One story in particular involves a reunion between Betty Grebenschikoff and Ana María Wahrenberg.

In March of 1989, Dr. Sharon Aroian-Poiser traveled to Armenia to help children recover from the trauma of the 6.8 earthquake that crumbled 250 villages and killed tens of thousands of people just a few months before.

But the children, following the lead of the adults around them, remained silent -- until the day Aroian-Poiser pulled out her tape-recorder and demonstrated how it worked.

Almost immediately, the children lined up, and in formal recitation, one after another, told the tape recorder about the day their world collapsed.

Twenty-one-years after my grandmother recorded her testimony with USC Shoah Foundation, I teamed up with the Institute to create a podcast about my own decade-long journey to retrace her war story. It would be the first-ever narrative podcast to be based around survivor testimony. After years of research, criss-crossing international borders, living in stranger’s homes, and harmonizing history with the politics of today, I began to sit with her voice. “I always felt very guilty,” she told the interviewer about her survival.