George and Giselle Weiss are both child survivors and natives of Belgium. George describes when he first met Giselle after he returned to Belgium from his military service in the Israel. Giselle explains how her grandmother disapproved of their romance because George was not orthodox. In 1955 George and Giselle married in Belgium and moved to the United States. February 13 2014 was George and Giselle’s 59th wedding anniversary.
clip, george weiss, gisele weiss, love, belgium / Thursday, February 13, 2014
George and Giselle Weiss are both child survivors and natives of Belgium. George describes when he first met Giselle after he returned to Belgium from his military service in the Israel. Giselle explains how her grandmother disapproved of their romance because George was not orthodox.  Two years later George and Giselle married in Belgium and then moved to the United States.
/ Friday, February 14, 2014
Chance and Choice: A Survivor’s Story highlights the poem "Could Have" by Wislawa Szymborska and three specific survival events from Jewish survivor Lusia Haberfeld's testimony to convey the role of both individual choice as well as luck in surviving the Holocaust.
iwitness, IWitness activity / Thursday, September 25, 2014
This series will highlight one teaching activity per day for 10 days, pairing eyewitness testimony with standards-aligned lessons that transform learning.
black history month, iwitness, Ted Talk / Monday, February 5, 2018
Holocaust survivor Romana Farrington breaks down stereotypes about Catholic Poles during the Holocaust. This clip is part of the new IWitness activity What is "The Danger of a Single Story"?.
clip / Thursday, August 18, 2016
In this activity, students will examine the impact that personal stories can have in inspiring others to action. They will listen and reflect on genocide survivor testimonies, discuss the concept of leadership and form belief statements about how they can become leaders in their communities.
iwitness, black history month, education / Wednesday, February 7, 2018
On a Wednesday morning in New York in the fall of 2021, Rabbi Nicole Auerbach greeted Walter and Phyllis Loeb in Central Synagogue’s majestic sanctuary. She led them through the arch-lined nave, past row after row of pews, beyond the six sets of capital columns wrapped in colorful, gold-accented reliefs, all the way up to the intricately carved Mahagony bima, the stage where the synagogue’s rabbi and cantor preside over Shabbat and holiday services.
/ Wednesday, June 29, 2022
Holocaust survivor Edward Mosberg explains why he feels it is so important for him to tell his story.
clip / Monday, September 11, 2017
The newest activity in IWitness draws on testimonies of Holocaust survivors to spark students’ reflection on how identity, and the struggle to hide it, can affect people from all walks of life.
iwitness, IWitness activity, Claudia Wiedeman / Thursday, April 21, 2016
Surrounded by his family, Sam Harris explains why he wanted to tell his story. Live audiences will be able to have a virtual conversation with Sam as part of USC Shoah Foundation's New Dimensions in Testimony project.
clip / Monday, April 11, 2016
The 22 new testimonies will bring the total number in the Nanjing Massacre collection to 72.
nanjing, Nanjing Massacre, nanjing survivor / Wednesday, July 20, 2016
In 2015 , I traveled to Guatemala with a small team from USC Shoah Foundation to train staff from a local organization called the Fundación de Antropología Forence de Guatemala (FAFG) to begin collecting voices from survivors to the Guatemalan Genocide.
GAM, Guatemala, Guatemalan Genocide, cagr, op-eds, cagr / Friday, April 8, 2016
Discover the testimonies of Holocaust survivors who share memories of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, which is commemorating its 80th anniversary this week as the 2016 Olympics begin in Rio de Janeiro.
/ Thursday, August 4, 2016
At the American Library Association's Annual Conference and Exposition -- New Orleans. (June 21-26) Location: Morial Convention Center, Rm 227
/ Tuesday, May 29, 2018
Although the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive is typically thought of as a way to preserve the stories of people who survived the Holocaust, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania has found a way to use the Archive to broaden the scope of memory to include not only survivors but also people who perished.
Paris, University of Pennsylvania, Rutman, map / Wednesday, May 16, 2018
Actor, director, filmmaker and advocate Yuval David has a weapon of choice he employs to attract audiences and disarm would-be haters: a positive embrace of his story and a persistent belief in humanity.
/ Friday, June 25, 2021
Renée Firestone had successful career as fashion designer after moving to Los Angeles. She recalls the conversation that convinced her to tell her story.
clip / Friday, March 11, 2016
Museum of Tolerance9786 West Pico Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90035Dec. 13, 2015, 4 p.m.No Asylum, directed by Paula Fouce, is the dramatic and tragic story of Otto Frank’s desperate attempts to secure American visas before going into hiding with his family in 1942. Based on recently-discovered letters by Otto Frank in the YIVO Institute of Jewish Research’s archives, the film also includes interviews with Anne Frank’s surviving family.The screening wil be followed by a Q&A with Eva Geiringer-Schloss, Otto Frank’s stepdaughter, and director Paula Fouce.
/ Friday, December 4, 2015
USC’s Human Rights and Genocide Awareness Week concluded last night with a moving discussion of women’s experiences during and after genocide, featuring survivors of the Guatemalan, Armenian and Rwandan Genocides.
genocide awareness month, defy, Guatemala, Rwandan Genocide, Armenian Genocide / Tuesday, April 28, 2015
Jan Karski echoes the sentiments of many Holocaust survivors who chose not talk about their experiences for the first 35 years after the war. Though he was not a survivor himself, he did not want to think about the violence and inhumanity he had witnessed.
clip, rescuer / Wednesday, November 11, 2015
In this excerpt from his interview for the Testimony on Location project, Holocaust survivor Ed Mosberg explains why it is important for him to record his testimony for future generations.
/ Tuesday, May 25, 2021
USC Shoah Foundation and The Willesden Project today launch the premiere of Music Dreams, an animated short film story telling the story of Lisa Jura, a young Holocaust survivor who in 1938 escaped from Vienna to London on the Kindertransport.
education / Friday, December 10, 2021
In recounting the past, Holocaust survivors deliberately or unconsciously craft the stories they recount about the Shoah. Whether through literature, memoirs, or testimony, survivors shape stories about the past while signaling what remains unsaid. Deferred memories – stories told many decades after the events occurred – often address issues that survivors did not dare or could not bear to recount earlier. Looking at these deferred stories through the lens of gender, we will explore how survivors craft accounts that insist on reclaiming, owning, and interpreting what the writer Ida Fink called “the ruins of memory,” often against the grain and in tension with academic interpretation.
/ Thursday, March 10, 2022
Gerald Szames is 2, maybe 3 years old. He is standing at the foot of the bed, looking at his mother. She is sick, propped up on a pile of pillows. He has other flashes of memories of life before the Nazis invaded his Polish shtetl of Trochenbrod in 1941, when he was four years old – his grandfather taking him to the mill, his father lifting him up to give him a candy and a kiss.
last chance testimony, lcti / Wednesday, April 12, 2023
A public lecture by Philippe Sands (University College London) Introduction by Prof. Hannah Garry (Director of USC Gould International Human Rights Clinic)
cagr / Thursday, December 14, 2017
It wasn't until Renée received a phone call from the Simon Wiesenthal Center asking her to tell her story that she thought seriously about sharing her testimony with the world. Hearing about a particular antisemitic event that occurred in Los Angeles made Renée reflect on her experiences and motivated her to share her experiences.
/ Monday, December 12, 2022
Renee talks about her transition into American life after settling down with her husband in Los Angeles. It wasn't until she received a phone call from the Simon Wiesenthal Center asking her to tell her story that she thought seriously about sharing her testimony with the world. Hearing about a particular anti-Semitic event that occured in Los Angeles made Renee reflect on her experiences and motivated her to share her experiences.
clip, Renee Firestone / Monday, December 7, 2015
For much of their life, Allen and Peter Adamson didn't know that Joe, their easy-going, suburbanite dad, a VP at a New York plastics company, had a remarkable early history. He had escaped Germany at the age of 14 on the Kindertransport, served as an interrogator with the U.S. Army during the liberation of Mauthausen Concentration Camp, and helped in a U.S. effort to intercept secret messages encoded in German postage stamps.
in memoriam, last chance testimony, lcti / Friday, February 11, 2022

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