As a little kid, Toni Nickel never could settle between Sesame Street and the History Channel, her interest in other people’s stories of war piqued such that learning the colors and the order of the numbers became forever secondary. Her curiosity – specifically in the Holocaust – came to a head in college when she took a History of the Holocaust course that used the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive. There, in a classroom at Texas A&M University, Nickel knew her fate and future were sealed.

During one of the most joyous times in her life, 13-year-old Mia Michaels decided to honor the survivors and victims of one of the darkest periods in history. Mia’s parents, Larry Michaels and Tamar Elkeles, have been USC Shoah Foundation donors for over 10 years, and her grandfather Gidon Elkeles fled Nazi Germany at age three while many other relatives were killed in the Holocaust. When it came time for her to decide on a project for her bat mitzvah, she wanted to connect to her family history and learn about how her past is part of her future, Tamar said.

In her testimony in the Visual History Archive, Lisa Slater describes seeing a cattle car filled with Jewish men, women and children during the Holocaust– but unlike most survivors in the archive who remember seeing such a thing, she was never forced inside it.Slater is one of the few “witnesses” to the Holocaust who gave testimony to USC Shoah Foundation – people who were not persecuted, nor acted as rescuers or aid-providers, but merely observed the events of the Holocaust unfolding around them.

Heather Dune Macadam is fighting to bring the story of 999 girls to life.Macadam is currently fundraising to make a documentary film called First Transport to Auschwitz: The Story of 999 Girls. The deadline for her Kickstarter campaign is Mon., March 31; click here to make a donation.

Before taking his students on a tour of Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, high school history teacher Ferenc Sós turned to IWitness.Sós is a graduate of USC Shoah Foundation’s Teaching with Testimony in the 21st Century program in Budapest, which introduces teachers to the methodologies of using testimony from the Visual History Archive in their lessons. He was a member of the 2013 cohort.

As a documentary filmmaker, historian and curator, Christian Delage has long consulted with and used video testimonies of Holocaust survivors in his work.

When students learn about the Holocaust for the first time by watching testimony from the USC Shoah Foundation, Inna Gogina knows exactly how they feel. She, too, didn’t know about the Holocaust – until she began working for the USC Shoah Foundation.

Twelve years after the last federally operated Indian Residential School closed in 1996, the government of Canada apologized to the system’s survivors. They’d been put through so much they hadn’t deserved, from forced removals from their families and communities to deprivations of food, their ancestral languages, adequate sanitation; from forced labor and adherence to the Christian faith to physical abuse.

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.

USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive is a tool that allows genocide survivors to tell their stories. But it isn’t their words that summer research fellow Erin Mizrahi is interested in; it’s their silence. Mizrahi, a fifth-year Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture Ph.D. student at USC, is studying silence as a theoretical approach through two very different subjects: sexual assault in performance art and the Holocaust.

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.