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Dr. Richard Hovannisian was one of the world’s foremost scholars of Armenian history and the Armenian Genocide. A child of survivors, he founded the Armenian Genocide Oral History Project at UCLA in 1969, recording interviews with more than 1,000 genocide survivors. He donated the collection to the USC Shoah Foundation in 2018.
Dr. J. Michael Hagopian, who later founded the Armenian Film Foundation, survived the Armenian Genocide after his parents hid him beneath a mulberry bush as Turkish gendarmes approached. In 2010, he partnered with the USC Shoah Foundation to preserve and archive 400 testimonies from the Armenian Film Foundation.
Francoise Muteteli was a young teacher in Nyanza, Rwanda, when a Hutu militia attacked her home and murdered her family in April 1994. Francoise escaped the attack by climbing an avocado tree with a bullet wound in her back. A Hutu neighbor hid her in an earthen oven until she was rescued weeks later.
Alphonse Kabalisa was 23 years old when he survived the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. His father and two siblings, as well as extended family members, were killed in the massacres.
Paul Rukesha, then 16, spent three months eluding Hutu militias who were rampaging across Rwanda in April 1994. His father, his stepmother, his brother, and many other relatives were killed in the Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. He remembers being rescued by the Rwandan Patriotic Army on July 4, 1994.
On May 4, 1945, Staff Sergeant Alan Moskin entered the Gunskirchen concentration camp, a subcamp of Mauthausen, with the 66th Infantry, 71st Division. The imperative to document the atrocities, ordered by General Dwight D. Eisenhower, inspired Alan to share his experiences decades later.
Leon Bass, who served as a sergeant with the 183rd Engineer Combat Battalion, was among the first U.S. soldiers to enter the Buchenwald concentration camp in April 1945. Inspired by his experiences, he later became a high school principal and spoke extensively about the Holocaust and racism.
Arye Ephrath was born in April 1942 in the basement of his home in Bardejov, where his mother was hiding to avoid deportation. He spent the first three years of his life in hiding, and Arye and his parents were reunited after the war. Here, he reflects on the millions of victims who cannot share their stories.
Gerald Szames was four years old when his family went into hiding in the forest near the shtetl of Trochenbrod, spending close to three years living in pits. In this clip, Gerald recalls an incident of antisemitism while a student at Ohio State University.
In 2016, at the age of 25, activist and social entrepreneur Erin Schrode made headlines as she ran for Congress to represent Marin County in Northern California. During the campaign and after, she was targeted by one of North America’s leading neo-Nazis with relentless antisemitic doxing.