USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research’s newest staff member may have just graduated from USC, but she is already a very familiar face around USC Shoah Foundation.Shefali Deshpande has just completed her second week at the Center for Advanced Genocide Research, where she is assisting director Wolf Gruner with the Center’s upcoming events and administration. She graduated with a bachelor’s in political science and musical theater in May 2015.

One of the members of the 2014 Teaching with Testimony in the 21st Century cohort in Hungary didn’t have any need for new lesson plans for his students, and in fact he didn’t even have a first day of school to prepare for: he’s retired. But he didn’t let that stop him from learning about how testimony can be used to teach students about genocide and tolerance.

Katarzyna Łaziuk is a graduate of USC Shoah Foundation’s Teaching with Testimony in the 21st Century professional development program and is committed to educating her students about the Holocaust – almost entirely outside her own classroom.

By Eric LindbergUSC School of Social WorkAs an adoptee from Taiwan growing up in San Antonio, Texas, Priscilla Hefley struggled to find her identity.To avoid being seen as an outsider, she embraced the mainstream culture. It wasn’t until college that she began to reconnect with her roots and what it meant to be a Chinese American.“Adoptees can have a sense of not really being American and not really being Chinese,” she said. “It was a real struggle. Where exactly do I fit?”

Dan Morgan-Russell has always been very good at arguing for the importance of international action against genocide.As a member of his high school debate team in Denver, his most successful speeches were always the ones in which he spoke about human rights violations and the need for the international community to intervene. Naturally, as an undergraduate at the University of Southern California, he decided to major in international relations and wrote several papers about the Rwandan Genocide.

He is perhaps the last witness to the Final Solution. As a young prisoner at Auschwitz II-Birkenau, Dario Gabbai was chosen by the Nazis to be a Sonderkommando – Jews who were forced to usher people into gas chambers, and then haul out the bodies, take them to the crematorium, and clean up the room for the next group of victims. A few Sonderkommandos survived the war, but Gabbai believes he is the only one left alive.

USC Shoah Foundation is saddened to learn of the passing of Johnny Strange, a record-holding adventurer and supporter of USC Shoah Foundation.

The hero of Alex Teplish’s graphic novel Survivor: Aron’s Story isn’t a crime-fighter or science-fiction creature – it’s his grandfather, Holocaust survivor Aron Rabinovich.

Dead Loop, a new book written by Holocaust survivor Moris Bronshteyn, was born out of a promise he made to the other survivors he interviewed for USC Shoah Foundation.

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.

After spending three years studying and working in Armenia, Manuk Avedikyan is applying his passion for Armenian culture and history to USC Shoah Foundation’s new Armenian Genocide collection.Avedikyan is currently working with program administrator Hrag Yedalian on indexing the collection, which launched in the Visual History Archive on April 24, 2015, the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. Ninety testimonies are already indexed and viewable in the archive; Avedikyan expects to finish indexing the remaining 300 by this spring.

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.

We are sad to learn of the passing of Thomas Blatt, a Holocaust survivor who was one of the few people to survive an escape from the Sobibor death camp in 1943. He was 88.Born April 15, 1927, in Lublin, Poland, Blatt also served as a witness at the 2009 trial of the camp guard John Demjanjuk.

When it’s time for Kathleen Ralf’s class on Genocide and Human Rights to begin, her students log in from their homes all over the world. This semester, they were all able to take part in a common project through IWitness.

USC Shoah Foundation is sorry to learn of the passing of Aleksander Laks, the first Holocaust survivor to give his testimony to USC Shoah Foundation in Brazil and a special friend of the Institute. Laks passed away July 21 at age 88.Laks survived the Lodz Ghetto, Auschwitz and a death march as a teenager. He immigrated to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and became a leader of the survivor community there as president of the Sherit Hapleita (Holocaust survivors’ organization).

Nearly 20 years ago, talent manager and producer Steve Sauer was having a business lunch with Tony Thomopoulos, then-president of Amblin Television. Thomopoulos knew that Sauer’s parents were Holocaust survivors, so he asked Sauer if they had recorded their testimonies for Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation yet.

When Serena Dykman was four years old, her grandmother Maryla Michalowski-Dyamant recorded her testimony for USC Shoah Foundation. After Maryla described her experiences – she was deported from Bedzin, Poland, to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where she was forced to work as Dr. Josef Mengele’s translator, and survived a death march to Ravensbuck and Malchow concentration camps – the interviewer asked if there was anything she wanted to say to her granddaughter, Serena.Maryla said she hoped Serena “does everything so it doesn’t happen again.”

Aleksandra Visser started out as an aspiring cellist. Now, she’s researching Holocaust survivors for USC Shoah Foundation’s New Dimensions in Testimony project.Visser majored in music performance as an undergraduate at USC – she started studying cello at age seven – but when she realized she didn’t want to be a professional cellist, she decided to return to USC for a second bachelor’s degree in history.

Though they haven’t entered high school yet, Lauren Fenech is making sure her students understand the steps that can lead to genocide.In her eighth grade language arts class at Inverness Middle School in Florida earlier this week, Fenech led her students in USC Shoah Foundation’s Pyramid of Hate activity. The activity integrates first-person testimonies from the Institute's Visual History Archive with the Pyramid of Hate, a curricular tool developed by the Anti-Defamation League for its A WORLD OF DIFFERENCE® Institute.

The stories are truly harrowing.One man watched as his house was burned down – with his baby brother inside. Another man’s grandfather literally died protecting him from attacking soldiers, and women tried to make themselves “ugly” so they wouldn’t be raped.These are survivors of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre that USC Shoah Foundation interviewed for its Nanjing Massacre collection in the Visual History Archive. Since 2014, a total of 30 interviews have been collected and integrated into the Visual History Archive.

Leslie Rheingold uses IWitness to teach one of the only yearlong Holocaust studies courses offered in her school district in south Florida.At Cypress Bay High School, Rheingold teaches five Holocaust studies classes, made up of 10th-12th graders. She uses IWitness, Echoes and Reflections, literature and other media to teach about the Jewish experience throughout the year, but her students are currently doing research in IWitness on a different unit: groups other than Jews who were persecuted during the Holocaust.

When Michael Russell joined the USC Shoah Foundation staff in 2008, it wasn’t the first time his family had crossed paths with Holocaust survivors.His dad, Sonny, worked with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration after World War II, helping child Holocaust survivors get settled in England. Sonny even got to know Mayer Hersh, a well-known Holocaust survivor whose testimony is in the Visual History Archive.

Giving his testimony to USC Shoah Foundation in 1998 literally changed Hyman Schwartzblatt’s life.Schwartzblatt’s grandson, Jewish music producer and composer Eli Gerstner, said Schwartzblatt told his family almost nothing about his experiences during the Holocaust. And when he did happen to make an offhand comment about his survival, they never knew what to make of it. What was the truth?

Around the world, students are exploring genocide survivor testimony in IWitness – even in Pakistan.

Just a few months after he started working at USC Shoah Foundation, Clarence Leung was on his way to Shanghai for the 2015 USC Global Conference.Leung, who has a background in accounting, joined the staff as a budget analyst in the executive administration department, where he helps track the Institute’s expenses and other financial processes.

With the partnership of Arnold Mittelman, students can now exercise their creativity in a brand new way when learning about the Holocaust in IWitness.Mittelman is a theater producer, director, educator and administrator who has created almost 300 productions of plays, musicals and special events. He helped found and lead not-for-profit theaters including the Coconut Grove Playhouse in Miami. He is founder, president and producing artistic director of the National Jewish Theater Foundation (NJTF), which celebrates creativity and preserves Jewish culture in the performing arts.

Last spring, as the world observed its annual commemorations of genocides like the Rwandan Tutsi Genocide and the Holocaust, the staff of The Hollywood Reporter got to talking about how many Holocaust survivors had Hollywood connections, and how many of them were still alive.

Jerquila Slaughter’s students were inspired to make a real difference in their community after watching testimony in IWitness.After learning about IWitness at the Dallas Holocaust Museum Center for Education and Tolerance’s summer workshop for teachers, Slaughter began assigning IWitness activities to her students at Gilliam Collegiate Academy this semester.She used IWitness in her elective course that covers topics such as genocide and gentrification this semester and plans to also use IWitness in her Advanced Research course this spring.

When Maetal Haas-Kogan was just a few months old, her great-grandfather Benjamin Oudkerk gave his testimony to USC Shoah Foundation. Now, she’s a Harvard freshman and spending half of her winter break interning in USC Shoah Foundation’s education department.Haas-Kogan said she grew up hearing stories about her family’s survival of the Holocaust. Her great-grandfather had survived the war mostly hiding in the home of friends who were also part of the resistance underground movement, and adopted her grandfather as a young boy after the war.

After learning about IWitness from an Echoes and Reflections seminar, Tim Derbish incorporated it into a Holocaust project his school has assigned for nearly 20 years.At Dorseyville Middle School in Pittsburgh, Penn., every year the eighth graders complete a Holocaust research project called the Notebook of Remembrance. Students research different aspects of the Holocaust and produce essays, personal accounts, and other creative works.