April 19, 2013April 19, 2013 is the day of the 70th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Commemorative events held in Warsaw will honor the memory of the Warsaw Ghetto Heroes.

Egy pillanat alatt kellett eldönteni, hogy merjem-e, vagy ne merjem. —Somlyó György

In the summer of 2012, after a four-year, multimillion-dollar effort to preserve digitally the video interviews in its Visual History Archive, the USC Shoah Foundation discovered that 4,755 testimonies had technical or mechanical issues, such as video dropout or flickering, or audio problems.

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.

USC Shoah Foundation is committed to expanding its archive to include testimony from survivors and witnesses of other genocides and crimes against humanity, and to make such testimony available for educational use around the world, alongside more than 57,466 testimonies of Holocaust survivors and other witnesses.To that end, USC Shoah Foundation works with partners around the world, sharing the expertise the Institute acquired through the collection, indexing, preservation, and dissemination of the testimonies that are currently in the Visual History Archive.

USC Shoah Foundation - The Institute for Visual History and Education is pleased to announce its Fellows for 2013/2014 academic year.

Offering a sweeping epic encompassing the years 1911–1945, this adaptation of the best-selling novel by Annejet van der Zijl tells the real-life love story of a mixed-race couple and their struggle to survive and help others in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands. Free spirit Rika, with four children, leaves her unfaithful husband and in order to survive, she rents out a spare room to the university student Waldemar, a bright young man from Surinam who is suffering deeply in racist Holland. Against all odds, Rika and Waldemar fall in love.

As the week of Memorial Day comes to a close we honor the soldiers who helped liberate Holocaust survivors from concentration camps. Lina Jackson, who was among the Sinti and Roma populations targeted for discrimination as part of the Nuremberg Laws, recounts her liberation from Dachau concentration camp by the American Armed Forces. She vividly remembers the kindness of one particular soldier.

Tenth grade students at Windward School in Mar Vista, California have been piloting a new IWitness activity titled What Can One Voice Tell Us About a Genocide as part of their Global Studies class.

In 1941, the Nazi regime, ordered the Jews in Germany to wear a Yellow Star of David inscribed with the word Jude (Jew). The following year, in June 1942, Jews in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Slovakia, and other lands under German control were ordered to begin wearing Yellow Stars.  Betty Gerard shows the Yellow Star with the word Jood (Jew in Dutch) she was forced to wear as a child in the Westerbork Concentration Camp in the Netherlands.

Dr. Bertram Schaffner, who served in the U.S Army during World War II as a psychiatrist evaluating the mental fitness of draftees, speaks about the discriminatory laws and regulations against homosexuals in the U.S. Army and his efforts to protect their privacy.

On June 5, 1942, the Nazis reported having killed 97,000 Jews in specially constructed gas vans. Friedrich August Jeckeln — who served as an SS and police leader in the occupied Soviet Union during World War II — testified in 1945 that Reich Leader Heinrich Himmler, who organized the mass murder of Jews, told him shootings were too impractical, so gas vans were devised as a more efficient system. The method was initially used against the mentally insane in Polish hospitals in 1939. By 1942 the Nazis had begun to deploy more than 36 of these specially designed and equipped vans.

USC Shoah Foundation has granted the Istituto Centrale per i beni sonori ed audiovisivi headquarters in Rome full remote access to its Visual History Archive.