In March 2010, representatives from 25 universities and museums with access to the Visual History Archive came to the Institute for the International Digital Access, Outreach, and Research Conference, an unprecedented opportunity for collaborative learning and dialogue about the use of the archive in research and higher education.

Chava Kwinta remembers the hidden messages that were exchanged from prisoners in Auschwitz with the Poles just outside of the camp. This was how people began to find out what was really happening inside of the camps. This clip is part of the Visual History Archive's Alex Dworkin Canadian Jewish Archives collection.

In this lecture, Gabór Tóth discussed the ways text and data mining technology has helped to recover fragments of lost experiences of Nazi persecution out of oral history interviews with survivors. He also demonstrated how a data-driven anthology of these fragments has been built.

In his 1994 testimony, Mel recounts how he won a lawsuit in the 1980s against a group of Holocaust deniers who run the Institute for Historical Review in southern California. Watch his full testimony on the Visual History Archive Online.

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.

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.

Highlights of the 2016 Master Teacher program in Budapest. A USC Shoah Foundation’s professional development initiative, Master Teacher (formerly Teaching with Testimony) is a two-year program that incorporates workshops, mentoring, and community building to prepare educators to search for and utilize testimony from the Visual History Archive, as well as other digital learning tools such as IWitness.

Historian and filmmaker Christian Delage (Institut D’Histoire Du Temps Présent, Paris) gave a public lecture at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research focusing on analysis of different forms of testimony — in war crimes trials, oral history repositories, and documentary - and his recent project collecting interviews about the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris.

In this talk, Lauren Cantillon explores the tensions and textures of emotions present in Jewish women’s personal memory narratives of sexual(ized) violence during the Holocaust. Drawing on interviews from the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, she highlights some of the numerous Jewish women who shared their stories within the context of a Holocaust testimony interview.

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.

Bothe’s lecture, “Meeting Survivors Online: Negotiating Memory in the Virtual In-Between,” focused on both the theory and practical implications of the “digital turn,” or the rapidly evolving digital landscape that is changing how people interact with the virtual and analog worlds. Her research is centered on the Visual History Archive as a paradigmatic example of this shift in action.

Drawing on USC Shoah Foundation oral history videos, personal papers, and other sources, Dr. Diane Marie Amann's lecture situates stories of the unsung women who played vital roles at Nuremberg in the context of the Nuremberg trials themselves, international law, and the postwar global society. Diane Marie Amann is the inaugural 2017-2018 Breslauer, Rutman and Anderson Research Fellow.

In this clip from his 2019 interview, recorded for the Visual History Archive, WWII veteran and liberator Alan Moskin speaks of the importance of giving testimony. Alan Moskin passed away in 2023 at the age of 96. Read our tribute to him.

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.

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.

Four of USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research’s summer 2016 research fellows returned to the Institute on Tuesday, April 4, 2017, to share the outcomes of their fellowships and the impact of testimony on their work. All the fellows are studying or teaching at USC and spent at least several weeks in residence at the Center last summer to conduct research in the Visual History Archive.

Participants in the September 2010 panel discussion, titled “Rwanda: Confronting a Painful Past,” included Beth Meyerowitz, USC Professor of Psychology; Mathilde Mukantabana, Professor of History at Cosumnes River College and President of Friends of Rwanda Association; Freddy Mutanguha, Director of the Kigali Memorial Centre and Secretary General of IBUKA; and James Smith, CEO of Aegis Trust. Lyn Boyd-Judson, Director of the USC Levan Institute for Humanities and Ethics, moderated the discussion.

In her public lecture on Feb. 9, 2017, at USC, Robert J. Katz Research Fellow Teresa Walch outlines the process by which Jews in Berlin lost their rights, access to public spaces, ability to move freely, and finally their own homes, from 1933-38. Throughout her talk, Walch refers to the testimonies in the Visual History Archive that she has discovered of Holocaust survivors who describe living through this period and its effect on them.

In this lecture, Barnabas Balint—PhD candidate in History, Magdalen College, University of Oxford, UK, and 2021-2022 Breslauer, Rutman, and Anderson Research Fellow—examines how the identities of this interwar generation were formed in times of crisis for the Jewish community, how their roles and agency in society changed, and how the institutions they were connected to reacted to persecution. He analyzes the subjective and personal ways young people experienced their age during the Holocaust in Hungary.

Lesly Culp decided to teach with eyewitness testimony to the Holocaust from the Visual History Archive to teach her students on what it means to be human. An extremely valuable lesson. ‪#‎BeginsWithMe‬ launches in two weeks!

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.

Sarkis Miranian was born in 1908 or after in Yeghekis (present-day Göllü) in the current province of Bitlis, a village nestled in a valley on the southern shores of Lake Van. He describes the situation in his village right before the Genocide began in the Van region as well as the immediate impact it had on his family.  This audio clip is a part of the Richard G. Hovannisian Armenian Genocide Oral History Collection which is an audio only collection.

July 24, 2014: Harry Reicher, Professor of Law at University of Pennsylvania and USC Shoah Foundation's inaugural Rutman Teaching Fellow, utilized his fellowship to collect Holocaust survivor testimony content he could utilize in his classes, which currently make liberal use of multimedia content.Featuring historical footage, Nazi propaganda film, modern cinema clips, and Visual History Archive testimony, Reicher's lecture provided an overview of the Nazi legal system and demonstrated the value of film in teaching this subject.

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 28, 2013:  The Student Voices short film contest enables USC students to join the conversation about genocide and human rights by using the Visual History Archive to craft visual arguments around these topics. The top films were screened at a special event hosted by the USC School of Cinematic Arts. Following the screening, the USC Shoah Foundation moderated a discussion with the judges, including Ari Sandel, who won the 2006 Academy Award for Best Short Film for West Bank Story.

Chair/Moderadora: Susan Fitzpatrick-Behrens, Latin American Studies, CSU Northridge

Chair/Moderadora: Susan Fitzpatrick-Behrens, Latin American Studies, CSU Northridge

In this lecture, Philippe Sands discusses his most recent book East West Street: On the Origins of 'Genocide' and 'Crimes Against Humanity' — part historical detective story, part family history, part legal thriller — to connect his work on 'crimes against humanity' and 'genocide', the events that overwhelmed his family in Lviv during World War II, and the untold story at the heart of the Nuremberg trial that pits lawyers Rafael Lemkin and Hersch Lauterpacht against Hans Frank, defendant number 7, former Governor General of Nazi-occupied Poland and Adolf Hitler's lawyer.