Nicholas Bredie (PhD candidate in Literature and Creative Writing, USC) conducted research to contribute to a hybrid work of fiction and non-fiction centered around the life history of his great aunt, who was murdered in 1945 in the Neuengamme concentration camp.

November 15, 2012: Dr. Sean Field discussed oral histories in the context of both the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the Centre for Popular Memory in South Africa and approaches to studying memories of violence.

Rena Finder survived the Holocaust by working in Oscar Schindler’s factory. Finder is a featured speaker for the Holocaust Memorial Ceremony at the United Nations on January 27, the International Day of Commemoration in memory of the victims of the Holocaust.

Dieses Video ist ein herunterladbarer Zusammenschnitt von mehreren Zeitzeugen-Interviews des USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archivs, welche mit jüdischen Überlebenden geführt wurden, die in der polnischen Stadt Oświęcim geboren wurden und aufgewachsen sind. Heute kennt man Oświęcim als eine Stadt, die von dem Lagerkomplex Auschwitz gezeichnet ist.

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

In this lecture, Bieke Van Camp presented some of the findings of her ongoing doctoral research on social interaction and group survival strategies in the Nazi concentration and extermination camps. She explored how network analysis of Italian testimonies from the oral collections of the Visual History Archive and the Centro Documentazione Ebraica Contemporanea of Milan suggests that a very large majority of Italian Jews were deported initially to the same Nazi Lager (Birkenau) during a rather small lapse of time (October 1943 – 1945).

More about Sara Góralnik Shapiro Sara Góralnik Shapiro remembers the day her mother sent her and her brother out of the Korzec ghetto in the hopes they would survive with a Ukrainian farmer. Watch Sara Góralnik Shapiro's full testimony in the Visual History Archive Online.

At the inaugural Scholar Lab online lecture series event, held September 14, 2022, MacArthur Grant-winner Dr. Josh Kun of USC presents commentary, music and archival recordings in his exploration of the Nazi’s use of music as a soundtrack of terror. UCLA’s Dr. Todd Presner, winner of the Digital Media and Learning Prize from the MacArthur Foundation/HASTAC, presents a computational analysis of the language survivors use to describe antisemitism in Visual History Archive testimony.  Discussion moderated by Dr.

Martin Greenfield, born in 1928 in what was then Czechoslovakia, was the only member of his immediate family to survive Auschwitz. He immigrated to the U.S. at age 19 and eventually made his name as a Master Tailor, making suits for six US presidents. As a new immigrant, he worked on the suit of General Dwight D. Eisenhower. In this clip, Greenfield recalls seeing Eisenhower when he was liberated at the Buchenwald Concentration Camp in April 1945.   

More than 75 years after the end of the Holocaust, the genocide of European Jewry remains a touchpoint for modern history, international law, and numerous other fields of study. As we face the passing of the generation of the direct witnesses, and confront new challenges with rising antisemitism, the landscape of Holocaust memory is changing. How can the second and third generation - and beyond - ensure the preservation and relevance of Holocaust memory in a world without direct witnesses?

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.

Maria talks about her aunt Adele Bloch-Bauer, who was painted by Gustav Kilmt in his “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer.” Nazi soldiers confiscated the painting at the start of WWII and after the war, the Austrian State Gallery claimed the painting as its own. Years later, Altmann fought to get the painting back for her family and she went before the U.S. Supreme Court in 2004. Ultimately, it was decided that the painting be sold to the Neue Galerie in New York City, and is currently worth $135 million. This is a part of the USC Shoah Foundation’s Women’s History Month Clip series.

English Translation: “Always remember what happened. Don't ever forget it, even if it starts becoming just part of history. Don't ever forget and, hopefully, that it will never happen again. Even though the world sees that it is not happening against the Jews, Genocide is still taking place—as in Serbia, in Rwanda. The world does not learn as seen with the recent rebirth of Nazism with the skinheads in Germany. Hopefully, there won't be people denying the Holocaust and people claiming that the existence of gas chambers in Auschwitz- Birkenau was invented by the Jews.

This moderated discussion features Dr. Jonathan Judaken of Rhodes College and Dr. Jeffrey Veidlinger of the University of Michigan, both the members of the Scholar Lab on Antisemitism program. As part of the discussion, Dr. Judaken and Dr. Veidlinger present on their research projects examining how major theorists of antisemitism understand its underlying causes and what prominent writers and thinkers in the historical western tradition had written about Jews, respectively, focusing on what we can learn about antisemitism from these writings. The discussion is moderated by Dr.

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.

In this talk, Ayşenur Korkmaz explored how the survivors and their descendants reflect on their ‘place of origin’ and ex-social networks in the former Ottoman Empire. What did or does ‘home’ and ‘homeland’ mean to them when it no longer exists in the way that they imagine(d)? How do we make sense of their site of memories and imaginations of the material and relational ‘home,’ and everyday life before the genocide?

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 24, 2014: 2014 Senior Institute Fellow Dr. Douglas Greenberg, Rutgers University Distinguished Professor of History, discusses a place that was in six different countries in the 20th century: the region of Wolyn, which is now in Ukraine. He is currently conducting research to reconstruct the experience of the survivors of the Holocaust who came from Wolyn, where 250,000 Jews were murdered before the death camps were completely operational.

Chair/Moderador: Douglas Carranza, Central American Studies, CSU Northridge

On August 24, 2017, scholars from Latin America presented their initial findings on their use of the Visual History Archive and mapped out potential avenues of inquiry focusing on Holocaust survivors who eventually settled in Latin America. This presentation is one of the outcomes of a "scholar in residence" fellowship that brings together scholars from a variety of disciplines to collaborate on a research project at USC for Interdisciplinary Research Week.

Held on November 16, 2022, this moderated discussion features Dr. Mehnaz Afridi of Manhattan College and Dr. Sara Lipton of Stony Brook University, who are members of USC Shoah Foundation’s Scholar Lab on Antisemitism program. As part of the discussion, Dr. Afridi and Dr. Lipton present on their research projects examining antisemitism in the Arab world and representations of Jews in medieval Christian sermons, respectively, focusing on the insights they gained into the causes, manifestations and consequences of antisemitism through history and in relation to religion.

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.

Chair/Moderadora: Hannah Garry, Law/International Human Rights, USC

In 2020, while longtime USC Shoah Foundation indexer Ita Gordon was participating in a pandemic-era Zoom call about teaching the Holocaust in Latin America, she heard survivor Ana María Wahrenberg describe parting from a dear friend at a Berlin schoolyard in 1939. The story stayed with Ita – she had heard it before. Through several rounds of sleuthing in the Visual History Archive, Ita found the testimony: Betty Grebenschikoff, who in her 1997 interview said she was still hoping to find her childhood best friend, Annemarie Wahrenberg.

March 6, 2014: Student Voices invites all USC graduate and undergraduate students, regardless of major, to create short films that incorporate testimony from USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive.This year’s themes were: Preserving Humanity, Renewing Rwanda, and Risking Everything. All themes represent the coinciding 20th anniversaries of Schindler’s List in 2013 and the founding of the Shoah Foundation and the Rwanda Tutsi genocide in 2014.The video shows USC Shoah Foundation’s annual awards ceremony. 

Chair/Moderadora: Marjorie Becker, History and English, USC