When Christa Calkins travels to Poland on USC Shoah Foundation and Discovery Education’s Auschwitz: The Past is Present professional development program this January, her students back home will be right there with her –at least virtually.

At the University of the Aegean in Greece, Pothiti Hantzaroula says IWitness helps her students understand the impact of the Holocaust on their own lives and the lives of others.

Living and working in the UNESCO World Heritage city of Trebic, Czech Republic, Daniela Vitaskova often teaches history by taking her students to historical sites. As one of 25 teachers chosen to travel to Poland to attend the Auschwitz: The Past is Present professional development program in January, Vitaskova will prepare herself to take her students to Auschwitz later next year.

Even in the earliest days of the USC Shoah Foundation, a staff of hundreds worked around the world to conduct interviews and create educational materials that used testimony to teach about the Holocaust. Yet, if they were based oversees, they probably never had the opportunity to visit the foundation’s headquarters in Los Angeles. That was Annette Wulf until just a few months ago, when she visited the office for the first time.

Keith Meador doesn’t mind that his students say they’d rather watch videos in class than listen to him lecture.That’s because the videos they are referring to are USC Shoah Foundation testimonies.

Milena Santerini, a professor and representative in Italian Parliament, has been a longtime partner and supporter of the Giving Memory a Future project with USC Shoah Foundation. That’s because she believes it is vital to teach Italians the true story of the Roma/Sinti people so that this long-excluded minority can find its place in Italian life.

When Keith Stringfellow was about 12, he was reading a book about World War II when his great uncle, a World War II veteran, began telling him about his experiences at Normandy after D-Day. Stringfellow asked him what affected him most during the war, and he answered simply, “Dachau.”

Since graduating from USC Shoah Foundation’s Master Teacher Workshop in 2010, Hank Koransky has made IWitness an integral part of his teaching at Brentwood School in Los Angeles.Koransky is a history teacher, chair of the history department and dean of faculty at Brentwood School, and has taught courses on everything from Ancient and Medieval History to AP Comparative Government.

By Cat VazquezWhen asked about what she does for a living, Judy Janec starts off with an explanation rather than a title. An average day at the office for her can take place anywhere, and at any time, but the assignment is the same: to index video testimonies from Holocaust survivors and witnesses. Often working from her laptop at a café or library, she closely watches the interviews, and using judgment and discretion, assigns key terms to each section of the testimony.

With the publication of her book Une vie contre une autre (One Life Against Another) historian Sonia Combe has become one of the first French scholars to extensively use the Visual History Archive in academic research – and she hopes many other researchers will follow in her footsteps.

Melissa Kravetz and Jenna Leventhal first met as undergraduate history majors at UC Santa Barbara over 10 years ago. Now, they are working together to introduce students to testimony through IWitness.