Despite living and going to school near Kiev, 11th grader Angelina Verbovskaya knew very little about the 1941 Babi Yar massacre when she started her training to lead the new Babi Yar IWalk. “I’m ashamed that I even did not know that Babi Yar is located in Kiev,” Verbovskaya said.

Arizona State University Professor Anna Holian visited USC on October 10 to give a lecture at the USC Max Kade Institute for Austrian-German-Swiss Studies. While she was here, she spent two days at USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research watching testimony for her new project on Jewish merchants in Munich and Frankfurt after World War II.

Empathy and concern over her city’s slipping memory of what happened at the Babi Yar ravine colored National Polytechnic University student Svetlana Polkovnikova’s decision to intern with the new Babi Yar IWalk, an educational program that put on a walk around the area guided by testimony clips from the Visual History Archive. “I joined the young interns program because it is very important for me to spread information about the events that happened in Babi Yar,” Polkovnikova said. “I would like modern society to know what happened here not so long ago.”

Since 2011, Jayne Perilstein has worked hard to make a difference at two organizations: USC Shoah Foundation and the University of Pennsylvania. And this month, she was formally recognized by Penn with an award that encompasses her work with both.

Michael Levesque helps his students at After School Matters in Chicago develop the skills they will need to succeed in college and beyond. Two weeks ago, those lessons included a brand new activity from IWitness that inspired his students to think about the world and their place in it.

A lot of pain is firmly attached to stories and testimonies of genocide. This in mind, Zhenya Bilotsky, a high school student from a Jewish school in Ukraine, yearned to do the stories of the survivors of the Babi Yar ravine massacre in Ukraine justice with his involvement in the new Babi Yar IWalk - an educational program that put on a walk around the ravine guided by testimony clips from the Visual History Archive.

He’s not a household name, but the man who invented the term ‘genocide’ and then embarked on a mission to secure legislation against the terror now has a movie to further the story of his life.

Peter Tillen was so inspired by his high school Holocaust and Genocide Studies elective course last year that he wanted to make sure his whole community celebrated the teacher responsible. Peter nominated his teacher Jennifer Goss for the Dawbarn Education Award, awarded every year to 10 local teachers by the Community Foundation of Central Blue Ridge in Virginia. Last week, Goss was announced as one of the winners of the 2016 awards, which comes with a $10,000 prize. 

Among many things that are hard to imagine, a site of massacre and mass murder is one of them. Even when that site is not that far away. As one of the youngest interns with the new Babi Yar IWalk - an educational program that put on a walk around the Babi Yar ravine in Ukraine guided by testimony clips from the Visual History Archive - 14-year-old Sofia Daragan did not know much about the ravine until she was invited to help lead the walks.

Danish historian Therkel Straede spent three days at USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research this week watching testimonies in an attempt to understand the truth about one of the most gruesome and taboo aspects of the Holocaust: cannibalism in the Nazi concentration camps.

The reaches of the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive are unparalleled, attracting researchers and professors from such places as Sydney, Australia and enabling them to further their work with the testimonies available online.

Through IWitness, Justin Loeber helps inspire in his students a personal connection to the Holocaust as well as the knowledge that they have the power to make a positive difference in the lives of the people around them.

Susan Davenport’s English students at John S. Battle High School in Virginia demonstrated just how deeply they have been affected by testimony from the Visual History Archive when they participated in the Institute’s #BeginsWithMe Giving Tuesday campaign.

Samantha Shapiro has a personal connection to USC Shoah Foundation, but she has begun using IWitness in her own educational work at a Detroit-area synagogue. Shapiro signed up to receive update emails about IWitness after learning about USC Shoah Foundation through her husband, whose uncle is its Board of Councilors Executive Committee member Mickey Shapiro.

Three years ago, USC Shoah Foundation launched the IWitness Video Challenge, hoping to inspire students to create positive change in their communities by watching the testimonies of genocide survivors and documenting their service projects in an original video.

Kari Shagena is combining poetry and Holocaust survivor testimony to inspire empathy and action in her students following an IWitness seminar in Michigan last summer. Shagena, a language arts and social studies teacher at Richmond Middle School, was one of over dozen Michigan educators who attended USC Shoah Foundation’s IWitness Summer Institute in Farmington Hills this past August, a three-day seminar that introduced educators to everything they need to know to incorporate testimonies and activities from IWitness into their classrooms.

In the field of genocide studies and human rights, storytelling is the most impactful way to give information weight. And the first step to doing justice to the stories and the survivors who provide their testimonies is ensuring they’re translated accurately and with context.

Though the topic of sexual violence against women during genocide is notoriously under-researched, sexual violence against men is even more so. And that’s what USC Shoah Foundation’s 2016-2017 A.I. and Manet Schepps Foundation Teaching Fellow at Texas A&M Tommy Curry hopes to change.

Professor Omer Bartov, considered one of the world’s leading experts on the subject of the Holocaust, will serve as the 2016-2017 Sara and Asa Shapiro Scholar in Residence at USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research. He will be in residence at the Center May 4-11, 2017, and will give a public lecture at USC on May 8.

For a historian, using a top-down approach is standard – you use government records, archives of primary and secondary sources to fulfill your research; you undress the documents and make sure they stand up, factually, and you stop there. But a bottom-up approach can provide a more complete image of an event, allowing those who lived through the time a voice in history.

Nancy Fudem and her son Jonathan have long been admirers of USC Shoah Foundation. Now, they have made it their mission to support its work from their home in San Francisco.

Even after using testimony in her teaching and research for several years, Professor Shira Klein still discovered something new during her tenure as the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research 2016-2017 International Teaching Fellow. The annual International Teaching Fellowship is open to professors who wish to incorporate testimony into their courses and research. The chosen fellow has the opportunity to visit the Center and consult with its staff and gives a public lecture at USC about their work.

On the seventh day of USC Shoah Foundation’s 100 Days to Inspire Respect education program, a series of tweets were posted by a teacher in Alabama, using the program hashtag #100Days4Respect. “There is enough sun for everyone,” one tweet read. Another said, “Don’t hate others even if they’re different.” Still another, “Someone’s race is not their character. Don’t hate, appreciate.”

When USC Shoah Foundation held its first-ever Ambassadors for Humanity Gala sweepstakes, allowing one lucky winner and their guest to attend the 2016 gala and meet Steven Spielberg and honoree George Lucas, no one could have guessed that the winners would have so many remarkable parallels to USC Shoah Foundation itself.

High school English and Holocaust Literature teacher Heather Lewis first learned about “six word stories” at an educators’ conference years ago, but could never find a way to incorporate them into her curriculum – until she discovered USC Shoah Foundation’s 100 Days to Inspire Respect program.

Inspired by the issues affecting his students in Chicago, high school English teacher Wesley Davidson authored one of USC Shoah Foundation’s new resources for 100 Days to Inspire Respect. Davidson, an English teacher at Chicago Tech Academy, authored an IWitness activity called “To Protect and Serve: Community and Policing,” which is the featured resource today, Day 29 of 100 Days to Inspire Respect.

Educators in the Detroit area are being exposed to IWitness in greater numbers than ever before with the help of Amy Bloom, Oakland Schools Intermediate School District’s Social Studies Education Consultant. Since 2015, Bloom has been involved with IWitness Detroit, USC Shoah Foundation’s initiative to widen student access to IWitness in the greater Detroit area through teacher training seminars – which range from one-day ITeach workshops to last summer’s three-day IWitness Summer Institute.

Professor Jessica Marglin is passionate about the testimonies of Sephardic Jews in the Visual History Archive, and that passion has rubbed off onto her students as well. Marglin is Ruth Ziegler Early Career Chair in Jewish Studies and Assistant Professor of Religion at the University of Southern California. She is a scholar of the history of Jews in the Middle East and teaches an undergraduate course about Sephardic Jews during the Holocaust.

Just over halfway into her month-long residency at USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research, 2016-2017 Greenberg Research Fellow Katja Schatte has already surpassed her expectations about what she would discover in the Visual History Archive. Schatte sat down for a Facebook Live interview about her research and her fellowship at the Center. She will give a public lecture about her work on March 7 on the USC campus.

Gaelle Elalam’s professional interests don’t necessarily intersect with her work at USC Shoah Foundation, but that work is just as impactful. The wannabe engineer has been a Junior Intern for the Institute since 2015, spending one day out of the month engrossed in analyzing what attitudes breed hatred and intolerance, how you can spread positive moral authority and how you can become an active participant in civil society.