In September 1994, Hogan’s Heroes actor Robert Clary stepped up to be among the first 100 Holocaust survivors to be interviewed by Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, the organization established by Steven Spielberg soon after he finished filming Schindler’s List.

Then, just weeks after recording his own testimony, Clary volunteered to be an interviewer. Over the following 18 months, he interviewed 75 Holocaust survivors, helping the Institute seed a collection that would grow to include more than 50,000 testimonies by the turn of the century.

USC Shoah Foundation mourns the passing of Holocaust survivor and accomplished structural engineer Sigmund Burke, who died February 6, 2022 at nearly 98 years old. He recorded his testimony with USC Shoah Foundation in 2019, at the age of 95, as part of the Last Chance Testimony Collection initiative, USC Shoah Foundation’s race-against-time effort to record the stories and perspectives of the last remaining Holocaust survivors.

Charlotte Kiechel, a Ph.D. candidate in Global History at Yale University, has been awarded the 2021-2022 USC Shoah Foundation Robert J. Katz Research Fellowship in Genocide Studies. She will be in residence at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research in Spring 2022 to conduct research related to her dissertation, which is entitled “The Politics of Comparison: Holocaust Memory and Visions of ‘Third World’ Suffering, 1950-1995.”

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About Yehudah Bakon

Yehudah Bakon was born in Moravska Ostrava (Czechoslovakia) on July 28, 1929.

March 1, 2022, Russian forces damaged buildings at the Babi Yar Memorial in Kyiv, Ukraine, dedicated to the memory of 100,000 Ukrainians murdered at the site during Nazi occupation. Among them were nearly 34,000 Jewish men, women, and children, killed over the course of two days on the eve of Yom Kippur in 1941. In this clip, Lyudmila Tkach recalls surviving the Babi Yar massacre.

When Zuzanna Surowy needed to make herself cry as the lead actress in the Holocaust-era feature film My Name Is Sara, she followed the advice of her co-star to “put a demon inside of her” – to imagine something so tragic it would bring tears to her eyes.

It was much harder for Surowy, then 15, to follow the second half of that directive: to leave the demon on the set.

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From the USC Shoah Foundation, simple, expressive animation brings to life the hope and optimism of famed sex therapist Dr. Ruth Westheimer’s childhood journey out of Nazi Germany.

At the inaugural Scholar Lab online lecture series event, held September 14, 2022, MacArthur Grant-winner Dr. Josh Kun of USC presents commentary, music and archival recordings in his exploration of the Nazi’s use of music as a soundtrack of terror. UCLA’s Dr. Todd Presner, winner of the Digital Media and Learning Prize from the MacArthur Foundation/HASTAC, presents a computational analysis of the language survivors use to describe antisemitism in Visual History Archive testimony.  Discussion moderated by Dr.

USC Shoah Foundation with its partner the Schindler’s Ark Foundation has added a tour of Oskar Schindler’s former factory in what is now the Czech Republic to its mobile IWalk application, enabling smartphone users to explore the site where the German businessman sheltered more than 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust.