APIP has been a powerful force for Polish teachers over the past year, says Polish Regional Consultant Monika Koszynska.

POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews premiered an original short film about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising featuring testimony from the Visual History Archive.

Poland’s new right-wing government wants to change the way children in that country learn about the Holocaust, casting Poles as only victims or heroes. In this new narration, the Polish people were always helping the weak, were good neighbors and cared about minorities.

The Watch page on IWitness has added Polish-language testimony clips for the first time, plus several other Hungarian and English-language clips, in time for the start of the 2016-2017 school year.

Eleven new lesson plans and long term educational projects were developed during the fourth Polish edition of the Teaching with Testimony program.

IWitness is expanding its offerings for non-English speakers.

Professor Atina Grossmann gave a public lecture co-hosted by the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research and the USC Max Kade Institute, offering a different reading of World War II and the Holocaust by mapping Jewish death, survival, and displacement via what she called the geographical margins – the colonial and semi-colonial regions including the Soviet interior, Central Asia, Iran, and British India.

The fifth annual Master Teacher program in Poland (formerly called Teaching with Testimony in the 21st Century) introduced thirteen educators to the Visual History Archive, sparking new ideas for teaching their students about the Holocaust and current events in their country.

IWitness now offers so many testimony clips and activities in multiple languages that new filters have been added to the Watch page and Activity Library to help users easily discover resources in their own language.

On the heels of filming its first-ever Mandarin-language testimony last week, New Dimensions in Testimony added another language to its repertoire of genocide survivor interviews: Holocaust survivor Nimrod “Zigi” Ariav’s Hebrew-language testimony, filmed this week at USC Institute for Creative Technologies.

USC Shoah Foundation’s international consultants in Poland and Czech Republic ended 2015 introducing the work of the Institute to new audiences.

USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research will host a steady stream of undergraduate, graduate and faculty fellows this summer who will conduct research in the Visual History Archive for a wide range of projects and courses.

USC Shoah Foundation Teaching Fellows Alina Bothe and Gertrud Pickhan’s course “The Deportation of Polish Jews from Berlin in 1938” has led to another family learning its fate for the first time and receiving a special memorial called a “Stolperstein.”

Polski nowy, prawicowy rząd chce zmienić sposób nauczania polskich uczniów o Zagładzie Żydów, kreując Polaków na wyłącznie ofiary lub bohaterów. W tej nowej narracji Polacy zawsze pomagali słabszym, byli dobrymi sąsiadami i dbali o mniejszości.

Nineteen educators gathered at Central European University Budapest the first weekend in July to share the activities they piloted in the classroom after being initiated into the Master Teacher program in Hungary last year.

In January 2015, I had the incredible opportunity to travel to Poland with other students, as a junior intern, for USC Shoah Foundation’s and Discovery Education’s Auschwitz: Past is Present program, commemorating the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

In January 2015, I traveled to Poland for the Auschwitz: Past is Present professional development program, commemorating the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau. This entire experience, was and continues to be a life changing event for me on every level personally, professionally, and academically.

The young Nazi approached 13-year-old Szulem Czygielmamn as he walked on the sidewalk of Lubartowska Street in Lublin, Poland, and shoved him off the sidewalk. Szulem was lucky; Jews had died for less.

Neumark spoke to undergraduate students in Wolf Gruner's "Resistance to Genocide" class and donated two postcards he wrote while he was evading the Nazis.

As fall meets winter, we find ourselves in the seasonal in-between – summer is gone and winter is not yet biting. Yet it is in the in-between that we find moments for appreciation with friends and family. We create these moments in the cycle of the seasons. I think about what it means to live in the in-between – in a place of ambiguity and uncertainty where we must negotiate both the successes and the struggles of daily life. Progress propels us forward, but sometimes it is a roller coaster rather than the smooth gradient we may wish for.

A person doesn’t visit the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Poland and come away unchanged, and I was no exception. The empty barracks, the barbed-wire fencing, the solemn exhibits, the telltale chimneys – all these vestiges left a strong impression. But what struck me most was the sheer vastness of the sprawling memorial to history’s most notorious death camp. Walking through Birkenau with my tour group, I gaped at the emptiness stretching for a mile in every direction – nothing but the crumbling remains of buildings half-buried in snow.

The Canadian collections consist of 1,250 testimonies taken by nine organizations in Canada, the three biggest of which are the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre, Sarah and Chaim Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre, and McGill University.

Julia Werner, the 2015/2016 Margee and Douglas Greenberg Research Fellow, finished up her two-and-a-half week visit to USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research last Thursday with a talk, “Beyond the Pictorial Frame: Ghettoization of the Jews in Poland,” on her research.

Discover the testimonies of Holocaust survivors who share memories of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, which is commemorating its 80th anniversary this week as the 2016 Olympics begin in Rio de Janeiro.

As the son of two survivors of the Shoah and the husband of a daughter of two survivors, identifying as the Next Generation has been the essence of who I am. It is the prism through which I see and evaluate all worldly events. It was particularly my father’s life that affected me the most. He truly was a “survivor." He survived the war running for his life through Russia, Siberian labor camps and other lands in Asia. He survived losing his parents, five of his sisters their husbands and children. He escaped from his hometown in the Russian sector to a displaced person camp in in the American sector. He survived as a refugee in Belgium and then as an immigrant in the United States. He survived the loss of his wife at a young age raising three children as a single parent in a foreign land.

This collection of photos offers a rare glimpse of an outdoor Jewish ghetto in the countryside – specifically in Kutno, Poland. The images depict a form of ghetto that was actually more common, but far less known, than the urban settings (i.e. Warsaw Ghetto) that are cemented in the public imagination.

In January 2015, I had the incredible opportunity to travel to Poland with other students from across the country for USC Shoah Foundation’s and Discovery Education’s Auschwitz: Past is Present program. We toured various sites in Warsaw and Krakow, Poland, with teachers and our friend Paula Lebovics, a survivor of the Holocaust. Each point in the trip was remarkable and extremely inspiring. However, the visit to the Auschwitz-Birkeanu Memorial Museum impacted me the most.

As the first anniversary of my life-changing trip to Poland is upon me, I take time to reflect on the impact that trip has made on me both personally and professionally.  I have learned so much from my experiences as a teacher in USC Shoah Foundation’s and Discovery Education’s Auschwitz: The Past is Present program.

Maximilian Kolbe, born in Poland in 1894, was a Franciscan friar and Catholic priest. He spent most of his life studying theology and dedicating himself to the church, traveling across Europe and Asia during his lifetime.

As educators, we are asked to help our students effectively process the outcome of our elections and the implications it may have in their communities. In doing so, we need to find ways to provide them a safe and supportive place to understand their changing roles.