Three different video clips from Roman Kent's tesitmony including life before, during and after the Holocaust.

The research of these panelists sheds light on various challenges in mediating oral histories. Is it possible to mediate oral histories in an archive and respect the authenticity and nuance of individual narratives that fall into a larger narrative, for instance in an archive? Questions of translation, distortion, and interview methodology are explored to varying degrees by the work of these presenters. Is it possible to convey specific emotions across cultures, language, and identity?Chair: Karen JungblutPeg LeVine, Ph.D., Ed.D.Mark Zaurov, Ph.D.

Dr. Jared McBride, 2014-2015 recipient of the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research's Douglas and Margee Greenberg Research Fellowship discusses how oral history and testimony can be integrated with existing archival documents to recreate a micro-level history of the Holocaust in western Ukraine.

Once events are recorded in media it becomes a challenge to control or anticipate how that media will be used. Some voices become dominant while others fade out of memory. How is a contextualized narrative produced or reconciled? How do academics make sense of media that was created with differing methodologies or research practices? The research of this panel focuses on cases that elucidate these challenges. Chair: Geoffrey Robinson, Ph.D.Stef Scagliola, Ph.D.Amy Rothschild, J.D.Viola Lasmana

In the spring of 1915, the Young Turk regime of the Ottoman began a genocide against its Armenian population under the cover of World War I. This minute-long excerpt features survivor Haroutune Aivazian.  He describes the horror his mother faced when a town crier in Marash, a city in Cilcia in South West Anatolia, called for the Armenians of the community to gather in a square just outside of the town for deportation. As his mother prepared for the journey, a local Turkish man warned the family that deportation meant death.

On November 19, 2015, visiting scholar Maximilian Strnad gave a lecture on the role that intermarriage played in the survival of German Jews during World War II.

When Michael Hagopian made his first classic acclaimed documentary on the Armenian Genocide in 1975, nominated for two Emmys, he titled the film “The Forgotten Genocide.” Since then decades have passed and hundreds of publications in a variety of languages have been written on the subject. The Armenian Genocide has now taken its rightfully important place within the field of genocide studies. It is not a “forgotten genocide” anymore, despite the existence of a denialist State - Turkey, which has developed denialism into an Industry.

Celé interview, ze kterého tento úryvek pochází, můžete shlédnout v Centru vizuální historie Malach, http://malach-centrum.cz.

Celá interview, ze kterých tyto úryvky pocházejí, můžete shlédnout v Centru vizuální historie Malach, http://malach-centrum.cz.

Celá interview, ze kterých tyto úryvky pocházejí, můžete shlédnout v Centru vizuální historie Malach, http://malach-centrum.cz.

Mahima Verma is a sophomore at USC studying Journalism and History. She shares how testimony is inspiring her work as an intern at the Institute.

Peter Komor says the best defense against future genocides is education. He and his granddaughter are both graduates of Cornell University, the 52nd full access site of the Visual History Archive.

After the disastrous Balkan wars of 1912-13, the Turks lost most of their European possessions. To dilute the Armenian presence and create a homogenous Turkish and Muslim population that would unequivocally support the Turkish state, the Young Turks decided on a policy of resettling Muslim refugees from the Balkan wars in Armenian areas and deporting the indigenous population.  These early measures led to the impoverishment and death of thousands; then came the First World War with Turkey taking the side of Germany against Russia and its allies.

Dr. Ugur Ümit Üngör, Professor of History at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, lectured on the involvement of Kurdish people in the Armenian Genocide as both perpetrators and resistors of the mass violence.

John K. Roth Professor of History and George R. Roberts Fellow at Claremont McKenna College, and 2015 USC Shoah Foundation Yom Hashoah Scholar in Residence Dr. Wendy Lower discusses the role of German women in the Nazi killing fields.  

Neuroscientist Glenn Fox is a researcher at USC Brain and Creativity Institute and used testimony from the Visual History Archive to study the affects of gratitude in the brain.

Historians continue to debate the extent of German responsibility for the Armenian Genocide in 1915. The Ottoman Empire was an ally of Germany during WWI (1914- 1918). During the war, Germany was blamed for the Armenian Genocide. Historian Arnold Toynbee in his widely read pamphlet Armenian Atrocities published in 1915 “indicted” Germany for what he called a “shameful and terrible page of modern history” in Armenia.

Vera Laska describes how, as a teenager, she helped Jews and French political prisoners cross the mountains from Slovakia into Hungary. This clip is part of the new Facing History and Ourselves IWitness activity Choosing to Rescue.

Branko Lustig, producer of Schindler’s List and our 50,000th interviewee in the Visual History Archive; recalls returning to Auschwitz during the filming of the TV mini-series War and Remembrance. Branko also describes how important it is not only to remember the Holocaust but also for future generations to learn from it.

Bella Fox recalls the terrifying experience of arriving to Auschwitz-II Birkenau from the Sighet ghetto in Romania. Bella’s testimony was collected by the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre and will be integrated into the Visual History Archive part of the Preserving the Legacy Initiative.

Over the last several years, I’ve had the distinct privilege to work with the recorded materials collected by the late Dr. J Michael Hagopian. A survivor of the Armenian Genocide himself, Michael had the foresight to capture the voices of those who witnessed the atrocities first hand.  Later this month, the USC Shoah Foundation will make a group of 60 of these interviews available through the Visual History Archive, ensuring that these recollections will be preserved in perpetuity, for future generations.  Michael would have certainly been proud to witness this accomplishment.

Specific places in genocide histories occupy different psychological spaces for survivors, witnesses, and visitors. When a place is preserved, or restored for the purpose of memorialization it is inherently transformed. This panel explores various aspects of this transformation: preparation, planning, execution, and consequences. The themes of memory, identity, and narrative are investigated in the creation of exhibitions and museum spaces that are also touristic landmarks.Chair: Marianne Hirsch, Ph.D.Edyta Gawron, Ph.D.András Lénart, Ph.D.

Sam Kadorian was born in 1907 in Hussenig, a small village in the province of Kharpert, in the eastern plains of Anatolia. He survived the Genocide in 1915 at the age of 8 when the Turkish gendarmes grabbed all the young boys of the village ages 5 to 10 and threw them into a pile on the sandy beach of the shores of the Euphrates River and starting jabbing them with their swords and bayonets. Fortunately, they only nipped his cheek and his grandmother later found him and nursed him back to health.

Raphael Zimetbaum speaks of his gratitude toward the Armenian people in Marseille, France. Along with his parents, he fled from Antwerp, Belgium, to Marseille, France, following the German invasion of Belgium in 1940. In Marseille, his family found housing within the Armenian community neighborhood, where they felt so welcome and were received with great affection. He states that he thinks that the sensitivity extended to his family may have been in part due to the history of the Armenian Genocide and the suffering the Armenian people endured at the time. 

In this brief clip Father Krikor Guerguerian is faced with a theological question that has challenged many survivors of the Armenian Genocide. The perpetrator confesses to him that he killed his father, three brothers and confiscated their house and garden and asks Guerguerian for forgiveness.

In this short clip Harry Kurkjian recalls Armenians who were about to be killed crying out in despair, “Where are you God?”  “Why are you punishing us?”  As the first nation to convert to Christianity in 301 AD, the events of 1915 raised a fundamental theological problem for Armenians.  If God is good and all-powerful, why was he not intervening on their behalf?  The problem of theodicy, as theologians refer to it, is an issue that surfaces in nearly every genocide, driving some people to completely abandon faith in God.  Indeed, the “God is Dead” movement arose after the Holocaust as Jewis

Wolf Dieter Bihl is a famous Austrian historian, with a number of published works on Austria-Hungary and the First World War. In this clip, he is touching upon two important issues pertaining to the history of the Armenian Genocide. The first is his assertion that representatives of the allies of the Ottoman Empire during the war, i.e. that other Central Powers, and Germany and Austria-Hungary in particular, reported extensively in their internal, confidential correspondence that what the Young Turk government was up to was actually a determined attempt to exterminate the Armenian race.

Alice Muggerditchian Shipley was 11 years old when in autumn of 1914 Turkey entered the war alongside Germany against the Allied Powers, and the atrocities against Armenians began. The Ottoman government took advantage of the war years to realize its premeditated and systematically implemented annihilation of the Armenian population. In this short clip, Alice describes the horrors of the first few months before her family was forced to take the route of deportation out of Harpout (Kharbert).

Shortly after triggering World War II with its 1939 invasion of Poland, Nazi Germany set about repurposing a system of immigrant barracks in the city of Oświęcim to house political prisoners. Renamed Auschwitz, the facility would become the most notorious killing factory in human history. Tracing this tragic trajectory is the 15-minute documentary “Auschwitz.”

Úryvek ze svědectví Marie Hořákové popisuje situaci v této nemocnici pohledem jedné ze zdravotních sester, ženy, kterou chránilo manželství s takzvaně „árijským“ mužem. Perzekuce těchto mužů, odmítajících rozvod s manželkami, jež byly rasistickými zákony označeny za židovky, je specificky protektorátní kapitolou historie holocaustu. Pouze u nás byli za odmítání rozvodu vězněni, internováni a deportováni do koncentračních táborů.