Herman Cohn recalls watching the parade in Nazi Germany for Hitler’s birthday in 1933 and how terrified he felt as a young boy.  

Bella Arnett (née Froman) was born on September 6, 1917 in Warsaw, Russian Empire (now Poland). She had three brothers and two sisters. Bella’s father, Chaim,
was a shoikhet, performing the ritual slaughter of animals according to Jewish tradition. He observed Ger Hasidism and was a respected member of the local community. Before the war, Bella attended a Polish school and received Jewish education at home.

Ruth Pearl was six years old during the Farhud, a Nazi-inspired pogrom in Baghdad in June, 1941. She recalls her family's scramble to safety.

Steve Acre was 9 years old during the Farhud, a Nazi-inspired pogrom in Baghdad in June, 1941. He recalls the Muslim neighbor who protected his family.

It’s a story my grandfather never told me, something that I only heard and understood later, years after my mother recounted it. In 1943, after his first wife and children were killed, my grandfather, Sam Wasserman, participated in one of the only successful mass escapes from a Nazi extermination camp. He and hundreds of other prisoners, overwhelmed and killed several guards and escaped the Sobibor death camp in Poland. My grandfather eluded capture, joined a band of partisans fighting the Nazis, and shortly after surviving the war, met the woman who would become my grandmother.

The ethics of studying Holocaust medical experiments will be the topic of conversation at the first-ever Zygo Student Lunchtime Series panel Friday at 12:30 p.m in USC Doheny Memorial Library room G28.

Celina Biniaz recalls facing Nazi Commandant Amon Goeth while working under the protection of Oskar Schindler at his munitions factory in Brünnlitz labor camp in 1944.

In September 1994, Hogan’s Heroes actor Robert Clary stepped up to be among the first 100 Holocaust survivors to be interviewed by Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, the organization established by Steven Spielberg soon after he finished filming Schindler’s List.

Then, just weeks after recording his own testimony, Clary volunteered to be an interviewer. Over the following 18 months, he interviewed 75 Holocaust survivors, helping the Institute seed a collection that would grow to include more than 50,000 testimonies by the turn of the century.

Robert Widerman Clary was among the first 100 Holocaust survivors interviewed for USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive, and he conducted 75 interviews of other survivors. In his testimony, he talks about his instinct and talent for entertaining—honed while he was a child in Paris—saved and shaped his life.

USC Shoah Foundation mourns the passing of Holocaust survivor and accomplished structural engineer Sigmund Burke, who died February 6, 2022 at nearly 98 years old. He recorded his testimony with USC Shoah Foundation in 2019, at the age of 95, as part of the Last Chance Testimony Collection initiative, USC Shoah Foundation’s race-against-time effort to record the stories and perspectives of the last remaining Holocaust survivors.