In time for February’s Olympic Games and Black History Month, two new activities have been published to IWitness, each dealing with racism in different contexts.
iwitness, racism, olympics, leon bass, Agnes Adachi, katsugo miho, margaret lambert / Thursday, February 20, 2014
Auschwitz: The Past is Present will support official activities of the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the German Nazi concentration and extermination camp
a70 / Wednesday, September 10, 2014
Watch Henry Rosmarin’s full testimony from the Visual History Archive as part of Comcast’s Days of Remembrance: PastFORWARD broadcast April 15-June 1, 2015. The sound of a harmonica usually brings to mind playfulness, joy, a sense of merriment. For Henry Rosmarin, it is also conjures the darkest chapter of his life, when his talent for music earned him favor with a Nazi commandant and kept him alive in a German concentration camp.
/ Friday, April 17, 2015
Capping off months of preparation, study and travel, the first group of USC Shoah Foundation Junior Interns returned to the Institute’s office in May to present their final thoughts on their participation in Auschwitz: The Past is Present program.
past is present, junior interns, Paula Lebovics, Lesly Culp / Monday, June 15, 2015
One of Poland's most beloved films is a unique example of music uniting both Jews and gentiles in the immediate post-war period that would soon become very difficult to find anywhere else.
cagr, music as resistance, warsaw / Friday, October 2, 2015
Howard Cwick was born in the Bronx, New York, on August 25, 1923, to Samuel and Sarah Cwick, both Polish immigrants. Howard had an older sister, Sylvia. TheCwick family spoke both English and Yiddish, kept a kosher home, and attended synagogue three times a week. Howard went to school at P.S. 100 in the Bronx beforegoing on to Brooklyn Technical High School. When he was seven years old, Howard received his first camera and became interested in photography.
male, liberator, soldier, Buchenwald, clip, unesco / Friday, May 27, 2016
Holocaust survivor Zenon Neumark and Guatemalan Genocide survivor Aracely Garrido are set to share their stories of survival and take questions from the audience.
genocide awareness month, defy, cagr / Tuesday, April 25, 2017
While students across America enjoy their summer vacation, the education department at USC Shoah Foundation is busily making major new features to its award-winning IWitness educational website for educators and their students that will be ready by the time school resumes in the fall.
iwitness / Friday, June 23, 2017
In this series, we take a closer look at the new features and resources coming to IWitness in time for the 2017-2018 school year.
iwitness, lala, iwitness360 / Friday, June 30, 2017
Bieke Van Camp, a PhD candidate in Contemporary History at University Paul-Valéry, Montpellier (France), has been awarded the 2018-2019 Robert J. Katz Research Fellowship at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research. Van Camp will be in residence at the Center in April 2019 in order to conduct research in the Visual History Archive to contribute to her doctoral dissertation, “The Shoah as a Social Experience and the Deportees as Social Groups. Socio-historical Comparative Approach to Italian and Dutch-Speaking Deportees.”
cagr / Saturday, August 4, 2018
Shortly after I saw Schindler’s List for the first time, I had an argument with my father about the value of such Hollywood blockbusters for teaching people about the Holocaust. We debated the following question: If Schindler’s List was the only source of information for people about the Holocaust would it perhaps be better if they did not see it at all? That is, is Schindler’s List better than nothing if what it shows is all you know about what happened to nearly six million Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe? My dad said (or shouted) yes, but I was unconvinced.
#TTIC14, conference, Schindler's List, op-eds / Sunday, December 1, 2013
USC Shoah Foundation’s Junior Interns witnessed a disturbing example of modern antisemitism firsthand during their trip to Budapest in June. And they have something to say about it.
budapest, junior interns, antiSemitism / Monday, July 31, 2017
The University of Haifa has become the first university in Israel with access to the USC Shoah Foundation Institute’s Visual History Archive, a searchable repository of nearly 52,000 video interviews with Holocaust survivors and other witnesses.
Haifa, Israel, Stephen Smith / Thursday, June 14, 2012
On July 16 -17, 1942, over 13,000 Jews from Paris and its suburbs were rounded up by French police in the early morning hours and forcefully taken from their homes to both the Vélodrome d’Hiver, a winter cycling stadium in Paris, and to the Drancy internment camp.
Vél d’Hiv, Paris, france, Hollande, GAM, op-eds / Friday, July 18, 2014
To mark the 75th anniversary of the revolt, USC Shoah Foundation is sharing the story of the recently departed Sol Liber. One of the last living fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising until his passing last month, Liber was also among USC Shoah Foundation’s first interviewees.
GAM / Wednesday, April 18, 2018
As Hannah, in the novel The Devil's Arithmetic, needed to have a first-hand experience to fully understand the Holocaust; my students must be equipped with first-hand information, too. While they cannot "time travel" as Hannah does, they can hear from survivors to have a greater understanding of the Holocaust.
education, iwitness, Information Quests, op-eds / Thursday, September 17, 2015
The largest gathering of Muslim and Jewish students and young professionals
/ Tuesday, July 5, 2011
A forgotten forced labor camp for Jews in Czech Republic has been rediscovered as a result of research conducted in the Visual History Archive by Marcel Mahdal, a graduate of USC Shoah Foundation’s Teaching with Testimony in the 21st Century program.
/ Wednesday, July 9, 2014
Jakub Mlynar works with USC Shoah Foundation across the world from the majority of its staff, but his enthusiasm can be felt all the way from the Czech Republic. Mlynar is the coordinator of the Malach Center for Visual History, a Visual History Archive access site located at Charles University in Prague. He is also its 2013 teaching fellow, preparing to teach a sociology course using the Visual History Archive next winter.
/ Wednesday, December 4, 2013
The fellowship provides summer support for one member of the University of Pennsylvania faculty to integrate the Institute’s testimonies into a new or modified existing course.
teaching fellowship, rutman teaching fellow / Monday, December 8, 2014
The office of the Ukrainian ombudsman conducted a seminar for 30 teachers on the best practices of human rights education using USC Shoah Foundation’s multimedia teaching guide, Where Do Human Rights Begin: Lessons of History and Contemporary Approaches.
Ukraine / Friday, February 12, 2016
Today marks the 83rd anniversary of the arrival of the first Kindertransport to the United Kingdom. This rescue operation saved 10,000 child refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe. As part of the commemoration, USC Shoah Foundation has produced an animated short film, “Music Dreams,” based on the story of Lisa Jura, a young Holocaust survivor who in 1938 escaped from Vienna to London on the Kindertransport.
education / Thursday, December 2, 2021
Painter David Kassan has sat with survivors of the Holocaust for countless hours during the past five years, carefully listening to their stories of pain, grief, resilience and quiet victory.
David Kassan, art, exhibit, fisher / Tuesday, September 17, 2019
In a webinar interview, the film’s director and the Institute’s founder says he believes that 25 years after the release of 'Schindler's List,' the film is more important than ever. “Especially for the young people today, who face a country and a world where democracy is threatened.”
Steven Spielberg, Schindler's List, Facing History and Ourselves, webinar / Friday, November 30, 2018
USC Shoah Foundation and Genesis Philanthropy Group partner to create first Russian-language interactive biographies for award-winning Dimensions in Testimony program.
russia, Dimensions in Testimony, DiT, GPG, mobile rig / Monday, December 3, 2018
Maria Zalewska grew up in what acclaimed writer and journalist Martin Pollack calls the “contaminated landscapes” of Eastern Europe, where most of the Nazi concentration camps and extermination camps were built. Her physical proximity to spaces of the Shoah, as well as her familial relationships to victims of Auschwitz-Birkenau, drew her initially toward the study of the different ways in which Eastern Europeans filled, organized and produced spaces of memory.
cagr / Monday, September 18, 2017
A group of Bioethics and the Holocaust Fellows recently gathered at USC Shoah Foundation headquarters in Los Angeles to develop content for new curriculums that will feature Visual History Archive testimony from survivors of Nazi medical experiments. The Holocaust marked a profound and sadistic deviation from traditional notions of medical ethics, with medical and scientific communities in the Third Reich actively participating in the labeling, persecution and eventual mass murder of millions deemed “unfit.”
/ Wednesday, January 18, 2023
Today we mourn the loss of one of our closest friends, Branko Lustig, a Holocaust survivor and two-time Academy Award winner who produced Schindler’s List and played an indispensable role in the founding of USC Shoah Foundation. He was 87. Shortly after the film’s 1993 release, Lustig -- who witnessed horrific atrocities at Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and other concentration and labor camps -- led the drive to implement Steven Spielberg’s vision of collecting 50,000 Holocaust testimonies for what was then called Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation.
memoriam, obit, Branko Lustig / Thursday, November 14, 2019
Rescue is a crucial topic in understanding genocide survival and appreciating the difficult choices that people make in extreme circumstances. Although many stories of survival during the Holocaust are due to unexplained and unexplainable circumstances, there are also numerous accounts of individual and group acts of aid and rescue that contributed to the survival of thousands of Jewish people.
rescue, résistance / Tuesday, September 16, 2014
USC Shoah Foundation is saddened to learn of the recent passing of Sol Gringlas, who survived both the Nordhausen and Auschwitz concentration camps. Sol passed away in May of 2020. He was 100.
holocaust / Tuesday, September 29, 2020

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