Over the course of 2016, testimony from USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive contributed to a wide array of published texts, from studies about the methodology of the Institute’s interviewing and cataloguing, to wholly other subjects that pulled from the VHA to back a defined thesis.

A few weeks ago, a student I was interviewing for a profile I was writing on him for USC Shoah Foundation’s website said something interesting: “Growing up Jewish, the Holocaust is pretty much always there.” I could identify. As someone who went to Hebrew school twice a week, every week, from the age of 5 to 13, the Holocaust was something I was always aware of. I was taught about it frequently, both in religious and regular school.

It’s a story my grandfather never told me, something that I only heard and understood later, years after my mother recounted it. In 1943, after his first wife and children were killed, my grandfather, Sam Wasserman, participated in one of the only successful mass escapes from a Nazi extermination camp. He and hundreds of other prisoners, overwhelmed and killed several guards and escaped the Sobibor death camp in Poland. My grandfather eluded capture, joined a band of partisans fighting the Nazis, and shortly after surviving the war, met the woman who would become my grandmother.

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.

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.

The Kristallnacht pogrom was a critical turning point on the path to genocide, and all of our #IWitnessChat participants agreed that using testimony is a meaningful way for students to understand and connect with the event. Hearing survivors’ detailed accounts of this night makes it much more accessible to students.

What I’ve learned, looking back at my family history and while working at USC Shoah Foundation, is how to do resistance. That’s how you do resistance. You see injustice and you tirelessly fight against it.

In this blog, the Center's 2022-2023 Greenberg Research Fellow Raíssa Alonso reflects on resistance and the roots of her research. 

The 10-part Echoes and Reflections series concludes with Lesson 10: The Children.

We are sad to learn of the passing of Kurt Messerschmidt, Holocaust survivor, educator and beloved cantor. He was 102. Messerschmidt was born Jan. 2, 1915 in Weneuchen, Germany, but moved to Berlin in 1918 and excelled as a linguistics scholar, gymnast and musician. He was well-respected and a leader among his classmates and teachers, but was unable to attend college because of anti-Jewish measures implemented by the Nazis.

Ukrainian educators can teach about the Roma using the Institute's resources and teacher's guides "Giving Memory a Future," "Encountering Memory," and "Where Do Human Rights Begin."

Much of the content is geared toward addressing some of the many conflicts that came to light during and in the wake of the neo-Nazi, white supremacist rallies in Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 15, 2017, such as the importance of speaking out against hate, promoting tolerance and acceptance, and embracing diversity.

Karen Painter, Associate Professor of Musicology at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities will be visiting the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research for one week this summer as Honorable Mention for the Center’s 2018-2019 International Teaching Fellowship.

For the second year in a row, testimony from the Visual History Archive is inspiring teenagers to illustrate true scenes of the violation of human rights during the Stalin totalitarian regime and Nazi persecution of Jews in Ukraine.

Wolf Gruner, Director of the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research, has published two new books about discriminatory policies against two distinct groups: the Jews in the annexed territories of the Third Reich and the indigenous people of Bolivia in the 19th century.

We continue our 10-part Echoes and Reflections series with Lesson 4: The Ghettos.

The conference’s first roundtable discussion will bring together four panelists from all over the world who will engage in a discussion about how digital archives can be used both to engage and inform the public and also aid scholars in their research.

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.

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.

"New Perspectives on Kristallnacht: After 80 Years, the Nazi Pogrom in Global Comparison" 

USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research staff are in Australia this month for several presentations and a workshop centered on the Visual History Archive and testimony-based research.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) has constructed a new IWitness activity in conjunction with the museum’s Some Were Neighbors exhibit.

The app by USC Shoah Foundation guides visitors as they move through the plaza, providing explanations about each interpretive element, as well as personal stories by survivors, maps, photos and other multimedia.

The award-winning French documentarian Claude Lanzmann will present his latest film and participate in a discussion with USC Shoah Foundation executive director Stephen Smith at the USC School of Cinematic Arts Tues., Dec. 10.

A pioneering moment for Holocaust education, the world’s first virtual reality film to take audiences through a concentration camp, launches as immersive experience at four museums in New York, California, Illinois and Florida for limited-engagement exhibit.

USC Shoah Foundation mourns the passing of Fritzie Fritzshall, president of the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center, whose story of survival and will to share it has inspired thousands of people. She was 91. Always hopeful and optimistic, Fritzie’s understanding of where hate and intolerance can lead if left unchecked has driven her her whole life to educate and empower everyone she meets. She will be dearly missed.

During a well-known case involving German industrialists who reaped enormous profits providing armaments to the Nazi regime with the help of slave labor at concentration camps, the defendants faced Cecelia Goetz -- the only woman ever to deliver an opening statement at the Nuremberg Trials.

Renowned Holocaust scholar and former USC Shoah Foundation Yom HaShoah Scholar Professor Yehuda Bauer has given his testimony to USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive.

A new exhibit on the USC Shoah Foundation website takes a closer look at the stories of refugees during World War II. It is inspired by the current refugee crisis in Europe.

Holocaust survivor Zenon Neumark and Guatemalan Genocide survivor Aracely Garrido shared their stories of survival and their messages for the next generation at a Genocide Awarenes Month event hosted by DEFY, USC Shoah Foundation’s student organization.