Shaul Ladany, an 88-year-old world-record holding speed-walker, has defied death multiple times. As a small child, he survived the German occupation of Budapest and Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Then, representing Israel in the 1972 Munich Olympics, he narrowly escaped the massacre that took the lives of 11 Israeli athletes.

Robert Widerman Clary was among the first 100 Holocaust survivors interviewed for USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive, and he conducted 75 interviews of other survivors. In his testimony, he talks about his instinct and talent for entertaining—honed while he was a child in Paris—saved and shaped his life.
Join us on April 15 at the Institute of Armenian Studies for an academic lecture on the Armenian Genocide and its related USC holdings by Institute Project Manager Manuk Avedikyan.

Dr. Alexandra Birch is a professional violinist and historian who is presently a PhD candidate at UC Santa Barbara, and fellow at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Advanced Genocide Studies. She also holds a BM, MM, and DMA from Arizona State University in violin performance. Her current project Sonic Terror: Music, Murder, and Migration in the USSR investigates the contemporaneous atrocities of the Holocaust and Gulag via recovered musical scores and soundscapes creating a humanizing look at incomprehensible violence.

Jadwiga Biskupska is associate professor of military history at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, TX and co-director of the Second World War Research Group, North America (SWWRGNA). She received her PhD in history from Yale University. She studies violence, warfare, and nationalism in twentieth-century central Europe.

Pavlo Khudish is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Archaeology, Ethnology and Cultural Studies, Faculty of History and International Relations, Uzhhorod National University, Ukraine. In 2016, Pavlo defended his dissertation at Uzhhorod University on Czechoslovak-Soviet relations in postwar Transcarpathia. He specializes in Holocaust studies, the modern history of Central and Eastern Europe, and Jewish history in the Carpathian region.

Denisa Nešťáková is a historian focusing on 20th-century East Central Europe, the Holocaust and gender studies. She is a research associate at the Herder Institute, and currently concluding her post-doctoral project Privileged to be in Hell. Jewish Women in the Sereď Camp which has been carried thank to the Saul Kagan Fellowship in Advanced Shoah Studies. Her examination of the history of family planning resulted in her 2023 book Be Fruitful and Multiply. Slovakia’s Family Planning under three regimes (1918-1965).