The USC Shoah Foundation and Living Links have named Mollie Bowman Managing Director of Living Links, the first national organization created to engage and empower third-generation (3G) descendants of Holocaust survivors.

An estimated 1 million grandchildren of Holocaust survivors live in the United States. At a time when the number of Holocaust survivors is dwindling and antisemitism is on the rise, 3Gs are uniquely qualified to offer personal accounts about how unchecked hate led to the Holocaust.

Christina Wirth, academic staff at the Leibniz Institute for European History and Ph.D. student at the Collaborative Research Centre (CRC) 1482 "Studies in Human Differentiation" Mainz, Germany, is the USC Shoah Foundation’s first Robert J. Katz Research Fellow in Antisemitism Studies. She will be in residence at the Institute in April 2024.

In 2020, while longtime USC Shoah Foundation indexer Ita Gordon was participating in a pandemic-era Zoom call about teaching the Holocaust in Latin America, she heard survivor Ana María Wahrenberg describe parting from a dear friend at a Berlin schoolyard in 1939. The story stayed with Ita – she had heard it before. Through several rounds of sleuthing in the Visual History Archive, Ita found the testimony: Betty Grebenschikoff, who in her 1997 interview said she was still hoping to find her childhood best friend, Annemarie Wahrenberg.

On April 24, we call on the world to remember the genocide of the Armenian people.

109 years ago, during the First World War, Ottoman authorities arrested hundreds of Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople (present-day Istanbul). At the time, the Ottoman Empire was under the control of the relatively new leadership of the Young Turks; a party that had sought to create an ethnically homogenous Turkish state – a state that would have little space for the millions of Armenians then living in that empire.

We mourn the passing of Dana Schwartz, 89, a Holocaust survivor and dedicated interviewer for the USC Shoah Foundation, who died on May 9 in Los Angeles.

Dana, who later became a teacher and marriage and family therapist, was four when the Second World War started. She and her mother escaped the Lwów ghetto and survived in hiding.

Living Links, the first national organization created to engage and empower third-generation (3G) descendants of Holocaust survivors, has joined forces with the USC Shoah Foundation. The new partnership will expand a Living Links program that teaches 3Gs to share their family stories in classrooms and with community groups to counter antisemitism, bigotry and hate.

At a time when the number of Holocaust survivors is dwindling and antisemitism is on the rise, 3Gs are uniquely positioned to offer personal accounts about how unchecked intolerance and hate led to the Holocaust.

For years, Celina Biniaz, one of the youngest people saved by Oskar Schindler, did not tell anyone – not even her children – that she was a Holocaust survivor. She feared no one could comprehend what she had been through, and she didn’t want to impose the trauma of her childhood upon her son and daughter.

Celina’s reluctance to speak ended in 1994. That year, director Steven Spielberg brought Oskar Schindler’s story to the screen with Schindler’s List. He established Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, which later became the USC Shoah Foundation.