USC Shoah Foundation joined a Friday ceremony at a classroom in Cottbus, Germany that contributed 100 butterflies to the Butterfly Project, an international effort by schoolchildren to paint 1.5 million ceramic butterflies – one for every child murdered in the Holocaust.

The controversial standoff between a tribal elder and a high school student that went viral has captivated the media and those on all sides of the political aisle. While all the details are still being uncovered, what strikes me is the climate that permeates our nation. We have devolved to a state of “othering” our countrymen, without reflecting on how our own actions may affect one another. We have stopped seeking to understand one another and instead just attack, sometimes even when the facts are not clear. 

In her research of testimonies, USC student Virginia Bullington observed that women in the context of both the Armenian and Tutsi Rwanda genocides are often described as “bearers of culture, maternity and nationalism,” while in the Guatemalan context, “indigenous women were not essentialized -- they were erased.”

Born June 21, 1923, in Olcsva, Hungary, Weiss and her family were sent to the Mátészalka ghetto. She was then deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp before being liberated by Soviet armed forces.

USC Shoah Foundation is saddened by the recent loss of Walter P. Loebenberg, a friend of the Institute and a Holocaust survivor who, after finding refuge in the United States, went on to open the Florida Holocaust Museum, one of the largest Holocaust museums in the nation. He was 94.

My life and my work at USC Shoah Foundation are strongly connected to the joys and the sorrows of the Armenian community. Thus, I was both shocked and heartened by recent separate events that demonstrated how far we’ve come in advancing human dignity and how far we still have to go.

Alberto Innocenti, grandfather of Francesca Innocenti, secretly hid Jewish people -- including members of his wife’s family -- in his apartment during World War II. For this and other acts of heroism the Catholic Italian was recognized posthumously by Yad Vashem.

We commemorate the students and teachers who were killed on Feb. 14, 2018 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, and we gratefully acknowledge the class of Ivy Schamis, the recipient of USC Shoah Foundation’s inaugural Stronger Than Hate Educator Award.

On January 25, 2019, the fifth- and sixth-graders of a school in Cottbus, Germany honored all those affected during the Holocaust by unveiling a Butterfly Project memorial to the 1.5 million children murdered during this dark moment in history. This first-ever initiative in Germany introduced a new, younger audience to real stories of local children.

As a teacher at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, who survived the tragedy on Feb. 14, 2018, I have spent the past year grappling with this question.

The story of Leon Bass, who took part in the liberation of Nazi concentration camps only to later face discrimination in the United States, inspires a group of dormitory RAs at the Massachusetts campus to share their own experiences of feeling excluded.

  “SS-Photographs from Concentration Camps. Perpetrator Sources and Counter-Narratives” Lukas Meissel (Ph.D. Candidate in Holocaust Studies, University of Haifa) 2018-2019 Margee and Douglas Greenberg Research Fellow February 12, 2019  

Instead of factories of death, these black-and-white stills convey the idea that soldiers are happy and prisoners are mere criminals serving a sentence. A research fellow with USC Shoah Foundation’s Center for Advanced Genocide Research discussed his findings on this topic in a lecture.

Last week a group of us from USC Shoah Foundation were in Guatemala with our testimony partner, the Foundation for Forensic Anthropology in Guatemala (FAFG). We attended the funeral of a Mayan man whose remains were recently exhumed by FAFG – 36 years after he disappeared during the genocide there.

The piece highlights how the interactive biographies will enable future generations to ask questions of and receive immediate answers from pre-recorded images of Holocaust survivors, long after the last of the living witnesses are gone.

The news about a group of teenagers throwing a Nazi salute at a party in Orange County is a startling reminder that knowledge of the Holocaust is fading. Here are four free online classroom-ready activities on IWitness that address the topics of antisemitism, bystanders and hatred.

In his 104 years, B. Artin Haig witnessed both the best and the worst humanity had to offer. He saw Babe Ruth play at Yankee Stadium. He photographed President Franklin Roosevelt. And he was one of the few remaining survivors of the Armenian Genocide in North America.

Roughly 1,000 audio-only interviews recorded by students of UCLA history Professor Richard Hovannisian were entrusted to USC Shoah Foundation. This week, Hovannisian and three of his former students gave a talk about how they amassed such a large repository of memory at so crucial a time, “when denialism was huge.”

The new office was the focus of an extended piece in this month’s edition of Interior Design magazine. It marks the second time the state-of-the-art space has been highlighted by a premier architectural publication.

In the predawn hours of June 6, 1944 – 75 years ago this week – an armada of Allied ships sailed across the English Channel and began unloading thousands of troops into shallow waters off the shores of Normandy, France. Operation D-Day had begun.

This month, the 2017-2019 Interdisciplinary Research Week team came together again for their second weeklong residency at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research.

When it comes to implementing Nazi Germany’s Final Solution, few places were more successful than Nazi-occupied Lithuania. More than 90 percent of the country’s wartime Jewish population of 250,000 was murdered in the Holocaust.

Holocaust Museum Houston this weekend will become the fourth museum in the world to permanently display USC Shoah Foundation’s Dimensions in Testimony, which enables viewers to verbally ask questions to a digital projection of survivors, and hear real-time, lifelike responses. The new exhibit features Houston-area Holocaust survivor William J. “Bill” Morgan, a 93-year-old survivor of the Stanislawow Ghetto in western Ukraine.

Mehmet Polatel, PhD and 2018-2019 Postdoctoral Fellow in Armenian Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, has been awarded the 2019-2020 Center Junior Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research. He will arrive at the Center in August and will spend one year in residence. As the inaugural Center Junior Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Dr. Polatel will conduct research in the Visual History Archive and will also teach a course on genocide in the USC Dornsife College of Arts, Letters and Sciences. 

The USC Shoah Foundation hosted winners of the 20th Annual Holocaust Art and Writing Contest on Monday, June 24. Participants were asked to create artistic or written responses to Holocaust survivor testimony from IWitness or The 1939 Society’s archives, in the form of poetry, prose, artwork or short film.

USC Shoah Foundation—The Institute for Visual History and Education (USC Shoah Foundation) announced today the appointment of Lee Liberman as Chair of its Board of Councilors and Joel Citron as Vice Chair effective July 1, 2019. 

USC Shoah Foundation’s William P. Lauder Junior Internship Program kicked off with discussions about the importance of being an upstander in their communities. It continued with a trip to the Japanese American National Museum, where they learned about the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII. And it concluded with student presentations.

USC Shoah Foundation is saddened by the recent loss of Eva Kor, a Holocaust survivor who – along with her twin sister – endured cruel experiments conducted on her at Auschwitz, and, half a century later, sparked controversy by publicly forgiving the Nazis who tormented her and killed her parents and two older sisters. She went on to found CANDLES Museum and Education Center in Indiana.

Today marks the last day of the USC Shoah Foundation’s 100 Voices to Remember Twitter project, a string of daily quotes from a different witness of the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda for each day of its duration. The atrocities claimed as many as one million lives over the course of about 100 days in 1994, when government-backed militias of ethnic Hutus went on a mass killing spree, targeting the country’s next largest ethnic group, the Tutsis.

The Holocaust is not widely taught in Latin America. Few books on the subject are available in Spanish, and university classes that do touch on the history are sometimes outdated.