Another year dominated by the ongoing pandemic draws to a close. From producing animated films to conducting interviews, forging new partnerships and sharing incredible testimonies, 2021 was a year to remember. Here are some of the highlights of the work the Institute has accomplished.

On March 5, 2019, the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research and the USC Dornsife Institute of Armenian Studies had the pleasure of hosting Dr. Richard Hovannisian, Professor Emeritus of History at University of California, Los Angeles.

In this clip, Gad Beck recalls the day he ran in to tell his mother that he "had his first man" and her surprising reaction. It is a sweet story of family acceptance and support.

The pages of my copy of The Giver are totally worn. The cover has been folded and there are subsequent pages with the same type of tear. On the bottom right corner is an advertisement for a special low price of $2.99 and in the upper right corner there is the embedded medal of the John Newbery Prize, one of the most prestigious prizes in literature.

Michael Preisler explains the story of Maximilian Kolbe volunteering himself in place of another prisoner, who was going to be killed. Preisler was a prisoner at Pawiak prison after Kolbe had been deported from Pawiak to Auschwitz. 

Walter Berger describes his family and upbringing before the war began in Czechoslovakia. His brother, Sam, is the subject of the new book "Roses in a Forbidden Garden: A Holocaust Love Story," written by Sam's granddaughter Elise Garibaldi.

Jean remembers a story where he lied to police about his age. This saved his life, but he never saw his mother again. This clip is part of the Visual History Archive's Montreal Holocaust Memoral Centre collection.

Helen describes how she established a school in the Radomsko Ghetto for young ghetto inhabitants. She introduced her students to “Gone With the Wind” because they longed for a story to take their minds off their harsh surroundings.

In this talk, Julia Werner attempts to tell the story of the ghettoization of the Jewish population in Poland through the lenses of several photographic collections combined with interviews from the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive.

Charlotte McKern, who survived the Holocaust by taking refuge in Shanghai, shares the story of how she met her husband, Robert Grosslight, a physician who’d been released from the Dachau concentration camp in Germany to migrate to Shanghai.

The testimony of Holocaust survivor Raphael Zimetbaum references Elise Meyer, the aunt of Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham, the real-life person portrayed by Meryl Streep in the film "The Post," by Steven Spielberg.

A film screening of Pamela Yates's documentary 500 Years. Presented in partnership with the USC School of Cinematic Arts. Co-sponsored by the USC Gould Law School's Center for Law, History and Culture. 

Amy Carnes, USC Shoah Foundation associate director of education - evaluation and scholarship, traveled to Chicago last week to observe and evaluate IWitness in action.

Holocaust rescuer Irene Opdyke gave her testimony to Jewish Family and Children's Services of San Francisco in 1993 and again to USC Shoah Foundation in 1995. Here, she speaks in each interview about why she shares her story.

In this lecture, Professor Atina Grossmann addresses a transnational Holocaust story that remarkably – despite several decades of intensive scholarly and public attention to the history and memory of the Shoah – has remained essentially untold, marginalized in both historiography and commemoration.

Joli Felsen never wanted to talk about her experience as a young girl during the Holocaust, until her granddaughter begged Felsen to speak to her history class. The schoolchildren were shocked by her story but also grateful for her visit.

Luisa Haberfeld remembers the selection process at Majdanek including being separated from her brother and father. Her testimony is feature in the IWitness Activity:Chance & Choice: A survivor's story.

Jewish survivor Renata Schondorf shares her very emotional story of how she barely escaped her fate while standing in line, waiting to go to the gas chambers. This clip is part of the Visal History Archive's Living Testimonies at McGill University collection.

Across the United States and in Europe, USC Shoah Foundation is helping to commemorate Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, on May 4 and 5.

USC Shoah Foundation is saddened to learn of the passing of Claude Lanzmann, whose monumental film "Shoah" introduced a new way of telling the story of the Holocaust. He died in Paris on Tuesday. He was 92.   Born Nov. 27, 1925, in Paris to Jewish parents, Lanzmann went into hiding during World War II. At 17, he joined the French resistance.  

An Unprecedented Partnership with Orlando Holocaust Museum for Hope & Humanity The Holocaust Memorial Resource & Education Center of Florida has partnered with USC Shoah Foundation to be a content and creative partner in the development of the new Holocaust museum to be located in downtown Orlando. This marks the first time USC Shoah Foundation has teamed with a Holocaust museum as they design, develop, and implement a ground-up and permanent museum-wide exhibition.

Modern methods of analyzing thousands of Holocaust survivor testimonies contained in collections such as the Visual History Archive present a challenge that is at once ethical and technological: how to listen to thousands of testimonies of Holocaust survivors as an integral body of voices and stories rather than a collection of fragmentary items in a database. In this talk, Hebrew University Researchers Renana Keydar and Eitan Wagner will examine the meeting point between testimony and computation, the new possibilities inherent in such an encounter, and the challenges and risks involved.

Jewish survivor Ze’ev Weiszner shares his painful story of purposely injuring his leg so that he wouldn’t have to work anymore and instead be sent to a hospital. This clip is part of the Visual History Archive's Freeman Family Foundation Holocaust Education Centre collection.

Dina Angress knew Anne Frank as a shy and quiet schoolmate in Amsterdam. Even though they weren’t close friends, she speaks on how Anne Frank’s diary was so relatable to her own story. Dina also relates on the importance of tolerance and Holocaust education.

Lusia Haberfeld recalls how her family evaded deportation by hiding in an attic within the Warsaw ghetto.  This clip from Lusia’s testimony is featured in the IWitness Activity: Chance & Choice: A survivor's story.

Bartov centered his discussion on how the East Galician town of Buczacz was transformed from a site of coexistence – where Poles, Ukrainians and Jews had all lived side-by-side for centuries – into a site of genocide during World War II.

Phil Scheinman didn’t know he had close relatives who survived the Holocaust until he saw the testimony of André Scheinmann, a cousin he calls the “Jewish James Bond”. Phil created a movie that brought together 400 family members — many of them newly discovered — to learn how André ran a network of 300 agents for the French Resistance and, even after he was sent to concentration camp, helped save dozens of lives.

The sense of history in the making was palpable Monday in Krakow, Poland, where more than 20 staff members of USC Shoah Foundation — The Institute for Visual History and Education attended a reception to honor more than 100 Auschwitz survivors on the eve of the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the death camp.

The critically acclaimed 2017 Hungarian film 1945 is the subject of a new English-language IWitness activity, 1945 – Homecoming.

“Oskar Schindler saved my life but Steven Spielberg gave me a voice,” Holocaust survivor Celina Biniaz.