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 He asks whether testimonies and memoirs bring us closer than other kinds of historical documents to understanding what people went through.

Tisha B'Av (The Ninth of Av) is a day of mourning and fasting. The holiday commemorates various tragedies that befell the Jewish people throughout history, particularly the destruction of the first and second Temples in 586 BCE and 70 CE. In her testimony, Holocaust survivor Edith Reifer recalls fasting on Tisha B’av while imprisoned at Krakau-Plaszow labor camp.

Located northwest of Drohobycz in the Lwów voivoship in Poland (after the war Drogobych, Ukraine), the Bronica Forest was the site of massacres of the local Jewish population by the Nazis in 1942 -1943. The Jews were taken from the Drohobycz ghetto to the Bronica forest to be killed until the closing of the ghetto in June 1943. Nearly 11,000 Jews were killed on that site, including Al’fred Shraer’s mother and maternal grandfather. He speaks in Ukrainian about the history of the monument standing on the site and explains how the executions took place.

Haig Baronian’s testimony touches on two important and interrelated dimensions of the Armenian Genocide: the gendered nature of forms and patterns of violence, and the Islamization and incorporation of Armenian women and children into Muslim households and society.

The noted Armenian hero General Antranig Ozanian, was born on February 25, 1865, and died on August 31, 1927. He spent the final years of his life living quietly with his wife in Fresno, California. General Antranig was the most well-known of Armenian freedom fighters in the twentieth century, and his exploits are remembered by Armenians throughout the world. General Antranig is buried today at the Yerablur cemetery in Yerevan, Armenia.

With a focus on our first-ever podcast, We Share The Same Sky, join us for a conversation of the digital impacts of testimony, featuring We Share the Same Sky producer Rachael Cerrotti.

“Being together with Dita - We did it together. [...] Neither of us would have survived without the other, and we both realize that.”⠀⠀ Margot Heuman was born in Hellenthal, Germany in 1929. In 1942, she and her family were sent to Theresienstadt ghetto, where Margot and her sister were put into a youth home. ⠀

Born into an affluent German Jewish family, Henry Morgenthau, Sr. was raised in New York, where he attended school and received his training as an attorney at Columbia. An early supporter of Woodrow Wilson, Morgenthau was tapped by the then newly-elected president to become the United States Ambassador for the Ottoman Empire.

Emiliia Kessler grew up in Khmel'nik, then part of Soviet Ukraine. She recalls the complex tensions between the Russians, the Ukrainians and the Jewish community that were part of everyday life in the 1930s. Related With Ukraine under attack, we stand by our programmatic partners in Ukraine and Russia working to  build more tolerant communities.

Alex Redner was 11 years old when the German army began bombarding his hometown of Lviv (then Lwow) on Sept. 1, 1939. Less than three weeks later, the Red Army occupied the city. Related With Ukraine under attack, we stand by our programmatic partners in Ukraine and Russia working to  build more tolerant communities.

Od roku 2012 byla součástí expertního vzdělávacího programu Svědectví pamětníků ve výuce pro 21. století pro české pedagogy i procházka protektorátní Prahou. Podobně s úryvky svědectví pamětníků v kombinaci s autentickými lokalitami pracovaly sesterské  programy v Maďarsku, Polsku a na Ukrajině.

Od roku 2012 byla součástí expertního vzdělávacího programu Svědectví pamětníků ve výuce pro 21. století pro české pedagogy i procházka protektorátní Prahou. Podobně s úryvky svědectví pamětníků v kombinaci s autentickými lokalitami pracovaly sesterské  programy v Maďarsku, Polsku a na Ukrajině.

Od roku 2012 byla součástí expertního vzdělávacího programu Svědectví pamětníků ve výuce pro 21. století pro české pedagogy i procházka protektorátní Prahou. Podobně s úryvky svědectví pamětníků v kombinaci s autentickými lokalitami pracovaly sesterské  programy v Maďarsku, Polsku a na Ukrajině.

The murder of extended families, the targeting of community leaders, the critical role of eyewitnesses--each of these factors surfaces in Haigas Bonapart’s interview. These tactics are all too familiar to those of us who study the crime of genocide and the strategies employed by its perpetrators. By destroying communal ties and eliminating those individuals who might rally a group in self-defense, civilians under systematic assault are made much more vulnerable to isolation and mass violence.

In 1968, filmmaker J. Michael Hagopian received a phone call as he describes in this clip, from a German, who had apparently been stationed in a medical corps in the Ottoman Empire in 1915/1916 and witnessed what happened to Armenians. Michael had not heard of this person before, but knew right away that this could be an important interview. Why?

“Get angry about it”, the conclusion of this clip, presents one of Israel Charny’s most important messages.

In this event Hosted by USC Shoah Foundation, in partnership with Writer's Bloc and Holocaust Museum LA, Batalion unveils countless stories of ingenuity, ferocity, and daring by girls and young women who fought the Nazis in Hitler’s ghettos in Poland. They blew up trains. They smuggled food and guns. They distributed false papers. They built bombs from a recipe unearthed in an old Russian pamphlet. They bought munitions. They spied.