What does home mean to you during this difficult time? Home doesn’t have to be four walls. Home is an idea, a concept, a place of being. Home can be a song, a person, a smell. It can be an action, a story, a dream for the future. Home isn’t always gentle. Sometimes it is challenging, maybe even frightening. Sometimes it is a place you want to run away from and sometimes it is a place from where you are forced to flee. Sometimes home moves with you and sometimes you never go back. Home may be the family you were born into, or it may be the one you create.

Throughout the month of April, Genocide Awareness Month, we have been asking for you to send in your stories of home relating to different themes: spaces and places, family and resilience. We have received moving contributions from around the world — from Morocco to Argentina to Israel and the United States. We have received photographs and videos and beautiful pieces of writing and poetry -- family photographs from generations before and visions of life as it looks now. As we move into the last week of April, we want to share with you some of what you have so generously shared with us.

In commemoration of Pride Month, the Institute recognizes the LGBTQ+ people persecuted under the Nazis from as early as 1933 to the end of the war in 1945, some of whose stories are in the Institute’s Visual History Archive.They are stories of survival, resistance, rescue, and heartbreaking loss. Some of the witnesses were targeted by the Nazis for being gay under the German penal code, Paragraph 175. Other witnesses recall their encounters with gay men and women who provided rescue and aid at great risk to their own lives.

An award-winning feature film based on a true story of survival, produced in association with USC Shoah Foundation. My Name Is Sara shares the story of Sara Góralnik who at age 13 survived the Holocaust by passing as a Christian after her family was killed by Nazis. Now streaming. For more information on how to view the film, visit the official My Name Is Sara website.

USC Shoah Foundation and Delirio Films in association with Neko Productions have completed an animated short film that brings to life the remarkable childhood journey of Holocaust survivor Dr. Ruth K. Westheimer escaping Nazi Germany, as she faced the choices that made her who she is today.


Giving Tuesday was created with a simple idea—a day that encourages people to do good by paying it forward, sharing kindness, spreading love, sparking joy and giving back. Giving Tuesday is a global generosity movement unleashing the power of people and organizations to transform their communities and the world. In these difficult times, we ask that you make a gift to USC Shoah Foundation to stand with us—against prejudice, intolerance and bigotry—as a beacon of light and hope for all of humanity.

360-degree testimonies on location use the latest technology with a single camera that is able to capture the interviewee and the surrounding location in a single shot. This allows viewers to feel like they are standing in the location with the survivor. The locations might include a childhood home, a ghetto, a concentration camp, inside a museum or other places of key significance to a survivor’s personal history.

In addition to collecting and preserving video testimonies, USC Shoah Foundation produces documentaries about the Holocaust and genocide. The Institute’s documentary films have aired in 50 countries and are subtitled in 28 languages.

“Continuing” does not begin to characterize the work that was accomplished in the past year — we crushed it by any measure.

The Memory Generation is a new podcast by USC Shoah Foundation's Storyteller-in-Residence Rachael Cerrotti. In this series, Rachael hosts conversations about the inheritance of memory and intergenerational storytelling. The first season is now streaming. 

The Academy Award®-winning feature documentary film shares the remarkable stories of five people ­– a grandmother, a teacher, a businessman, an artist, and a U.S. congressman – as they return from the United States to their hometowns and to the ghettos and concentration camps that once imprisoned them. The film is currently available on Netflix and Blu-ray.