USC Shoah Foundation is committed to expanding its archive to include testimony from survivors and witnesses of other genocides and crimes against humanity, and to make such testimony available for educational use around the world, alongside more than 57,466 testimonies of Holocaust survivors and other witnesses.To that end, USC Shoah Foundation works with partners around the world, sharing the expertise the Institute acquired through the collection, indexing, preservation, and dissemination of the testimonies that are currently in the Visual History Archive.

This video shows select clips from survivors of the Holocaust, as well as other genocides that have occurred in recent history.

View “The USC Shoah Foundation Story,” a video about the Institute's history and its current mission at the University of Southern California.

March 26, 2010: Audio-visual testimonies of traumatic historical events arouse profound emotions in their viewers. The pedagogical questions raised in this session focuses on the appropriateness and/or usefulness of emotionality in teaching about the Holocaust.

Making a Difference – One Voice and One Sandwich at a Time, was created by high school students Cassidy Stein and Ashlen Weddington. Students use IWitness to make personal connections to the voices in the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive.

Joli Felsen never wanted to talk about her experience as a young girl during the Holocaust, until her granddaughter begged Felsen to speak to her history class. The schoolchildren were shocked by her story but also grateful for her visit.

Horst Senger reflects on the significance and effect of the film, Schindler’s List. He emphasizes on how the film revealed the atrocities of the Holocaust to the generation who lived it and also the future generations who possibly only read about it in history books.  

In honor of Memorial Day, we gratefully honor Arthur Langhorst, an American surgical technician and decorated World War II veteran, and the 361 other liberators from 19 countries who have given testimony to the Visual History Archive. Arthur recounts in this clip a tragic encounter with a young soldier who was brought to his operating table after sustaining injuries in the Battle of the Bulge.

March 4, 2013: What can the Institute’s Visual History Archive teach us about other mediations of the Holocaust: how survivors tell their stories, how life performance and other media shape their narratives, or even how humor figures into remembrance? Rutgers University Professor Jeffrey Shandler, the Institute's Senior Fellow, explored such questions in a lecture titled “Interrogating the Index: Or, Reading the Archive against the Grain,” which gave a fresh look at the archive as more than a repository for testimony.

March 25, 2010: This session covers four presentations by faculty who have integrated the Institute’s testimonies into their courses in disciplines ranging from French and Italian, Didactics, Communication Studies, and Religious Studies. This session is moderated by Carolyn Ellis, Professor of Communications and Sociology, University of South Florida.

September 10, 2010: the USC Shoah Foundation Institute hosted a panel discussion that addressed the role of testimony in the process of national mourning, transitional justice, and memorialization.

March 25, 2010: Since the Institute’s testimonies were given around 50 years after the events described, researchers must confront issues of memory and reliability. In this session moderated by Andrea Pető (Associate Professor, Gender Studies, Central European University), Robert Rozett, (Director of Yad Vashem Libraries) addresses problems that revolve around memory and reliability. He asks whether testimonies and memoirs bring us closer than other kinds of historical documents to understanding what people went through.