This video focuses on the theme of diplomats and rescue and relates some of the best-known cases of aid provided by consulates and embassies including the efforts of Aristides de Sousa Mendes, Raoul Wallenberg, and Chiune Sugihara. Diplomats in countries throughout Europe helped Jews escape persecution by issuing visas and other travel paperwork that allowed Jews to flee Nazi-occupied territory. Featured in the video are the testimonies of Israel Kipen, Per Anger, and Henri Deutsch who recount their personal experiences of rescue during the Holocaust.

Jewish Holocaust Survivor

At age 4, Morris Dancyger witnessed the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet forces. In his 2008 testimony held by the Calgary Jewish Federation and part of the USC Shoah Foundation archive, Morris recalled the moment he and his family realized Soviet troops had entered their barracks. Shortly after liberation, a Soviet military crew filmed Morris revealing his concentration camp tattoo. This historic footage later appeared in the 1945 documentary "Oswiecem" (Auschwitz), which documented evidence of Nazi crimes and atrocities.

The Jewish Museum in Prague has teamed with USC Shoah Foundation to provide a new testimony-based lesson plan for teachers in the Czech Republic. The lesson, “International Committee of the Red Cross and Terezín,” is about the Terezín ghetto and its use as a source of Nazi propaganda in a 1944 International Red Cross report.

Today is International Women’s Day and this year we are honoring girls—from Holocaust Europe to Africa, from Central America to the Middle East, from occupied China to pre-war Armenia—who demonstrated extraordinary strength and resilience in the face of unimaginable horrors. Here is a selection of USC Shoah Foundation clips and films to mark the occasion.

Fifteen-year-old Eva Schloss describes the range of emotions that accompanied her liberation from Auschwitz by Red Army soldiers in 1945. 

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.

This downloadable video contains clips from testimonies of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust from the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive who were born and grew up in the Polish city of Oświęcim, now infamous as the location of Auschwitz camp system created there by the occupying Nazi German administration.

Ralph Leeser and his family fled to the United States from Nazi Germany in 1939. A few years later he joined the United States armed forces and helped liberate Buchenwald concentration camp. After the liberation Leeser and his fellow soldiers went to Braunau, Austria and entered Hitler's home.