David Bayer remembers when Nazi Germany invaded his home country, Poland on September 1, 1939. David and his family hid in the woods during the invasion and returned to town a few days later to find German soldiers in their home.

Leo Bach remembers the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939. He especially recalls his family’s emotional response upon seeing the bombardment and the movement of German troops in Kraków, Poland, on the first day of war.

An online event featuring #LastSeen Project Manager Alina Bothe Organized by the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research  Cosponsored by the Consortium of Higher Education Centers for Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights Studies

In early January, four members of the Holocaust Geographies Collaborative visited the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research for a week of intensive discussion, research, experimentation, and collaboration.

The 2017 Interdisciplinary Research Week team gave a public lecture to discuss the progress of their project so far, in which they plan to comparatively analyze the individual experiences and narratives of Holocaust survivors in four Latin American countries.

The Holocaust Geographies Collaborative made a return visit to the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research in November 2016 for two days to work together, present their continuing research that they shared at the conference, meet with Center staff, and plan next steps in their collaborative project.

Out of concern for their physical safety, four of the five interviewees remained anonymous and were filmed in silhouette. The fifth, 31-year-old Martha Nyawal James, recounted her extraordinary story of survival.

Jewish Survivor Anita was selected to become a member of the women’s camp orchestra as a cellist. Despite being out of practice, she felt no danger in auditioning for this role since they desperately needed a cellist. Playing in the orchestra kept her safe during the war. DOB: 1/1/1925 City of birth: Breslau Country of birth: Germany Camps: Bergen-Belsen (Germany) Other exp: prisons, identity concealment  

Professor Dan Stone, Royal Holloway, University of London, offered a global perspective of the origins and history of concentration camps.

“Why the Jews?” Join us for another exploration of this question in the second event of USC Shoah Foundation’s Scholar Lab on Antisemitism event series. This moderated discussion will feature Dr. Jonathan Judaken of Rhodes College and Dr. Jeffrey Veidlinger of the University of Michigan, both the members of the Scholar Lab on Antisemitism program. As part of the discussion, Dr. Judaken and Dr.

USC Shoah Foundation today launches its 500th IWitness activity with release of In Lisa's Footsteps, a primary level IWalk based on Mona Golabek’s acclaimed The Children of Willesden Lane books. In Lisa's Footsteps tells the story of Golabek’s mother, Lisa Jura, a young Holocaust survivor who in 1938 escaped from Vienna to London on the Kindertransport.

USC Shoah Foundation’s interactive IWalk mobile app has been named a finalist in the Cool Tool Mobile App Solution category in the 2022 EdTech Awards, the world's largest recognition program for education technology.

USC Shoah Foundation has added a tour of the Armenian Genocide Martyrs Monument in Montebello, California to its IWalk mobile application, making it the first Armenian Genocide site of memory to be featured on the innovative educational platform.

How best to fuse compelling testimony with the latest innovative technologies to produce the most effective instructional materials for students and educators around the world?

In my role as part of USC Shoah Foundation’s Education Department, I have the honor of working with our team members both in the United States and around the world to create localized educational content using genocide survivor testimony. As a former classroom teacher and a lifelong believer in the importance of experiential learning, I was fortunate to take part in three IWalks in Budapest, Hungary, Prague, Czechia, and Warsaw, Poland while on a recent vacation.

After months of beta testing with educators around the globe, USC Shoah Foundation is launching the brand new IWalk app, which offers 29 IWalks in seven countries and eight languages.

A public lecture by the 2022-2023 Interdisciplinary Research Week team (Join us in person for this lecture or attend virtually on Zoom)

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.

USC Shoah Foundation mourns the passing of our friend Phillip Maisel, who died in Melbourne, Australia on August 22 just days after celebrating his 100th birthday. Born in Vilnus (now Lithuania) in 1922, Maisel lived through forced labor camps in Estonia, Germany and Poland before emigrating to Australia and going on to record more than 1,500 testimonies of his fellow Holocaust survivors. He called each recorded testimony “a miracle” and thereby earned the nickname “the keeper of miracles.” His memoir, published last year, was called The Keeper of Miracles.

USC Shoah Foundation is accepting applications for USC student leaders to take part in the upcoming Stronger Than Hate Student Leadership Summit. Triggered by the deadly white nationalist rally of August 2017 in Charlottesville, VA, USC Shoah Foundation’s Stronger Than Hate initiative draws on the power of eyewitness testimony to help students and the general public recognize and counter antisemitism, racism, xenophobia and other forms of hatred.

August 2 was Roma Holocaust Memorial Day, the anniversary of the day in 1944 that nearly 3,000 Roma and Sinti women, men and children in Auschwitz-Birkenau’s Zigeunerlager (then known as the “Gypsy family camp”) were killed in the concentration camp’s gas chambers.

A University of California linguist has been awarded a $470,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to analyze Yiddish-language testimonies contained in USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive.

For the first time in two years, USC Shoah Foundation welcomed students to its international headquarters at USC for the fifth annual Leadership Workshop-Action and Values.  Eighteen rising ninth to 12th-grade students, selected from across the country, participated in the July 10 to 15 seminars, field trips, discussions, and group projects while based in USC dorms. 

Our longtime friend Pinchas Gutter turns 90 today! The survivor of six German Nazi concentration camps has shared his remarkable story with USC Shoah Foundation in a variety of formats over the years, including as a Dimensions in Testimony interactive biography that has been featured by media outlets including CBS 60 Minutes and the New York Times. Earlier this year Pinchas sat down with us to reflect on contemporary events and his experiences. 

July 11 marks 26 years since the Srebrenica genocide, the biggest in a cluster of massacres that occurred as part of the campaign of ethnic cleansing in eastern parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina during the 1992-1995 war in the country. It’s the day in 1995 that Bosnian Serb forces led by General Ratko Mladic overran the enclave of Srebrenica, the town in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina the United Nations had formally designated as a “safe area” in 1993. 

USC Shoah Foundation mourns the passing of our friend Max Eisen, a Holocaust survivor who returned to Auschwitz-Birkenau more than 20 times as an educator and testified at the trials of two SS guards in 2015, more than 70 years after his entire family was killed in Nazi concentration camps. Max’s memoir, By Chance Alone: A Remarkable True Story of Courage and Survival at Auschwitz, was the 2019 winner of Canada Reads, a Canadian Broadcasting Company “battle of the books” program, and was shortlisted for the RBC Taylor Prize in 2017. 

July 4 is Kwibohora, also known as Rwanda Liberation Day. On this day in 1994 the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) secured the capital of Kigali and ended the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda. To commemorate Kwibohora, we spoke to three genocide survivors now residing in the United States.

USC Shoah Foundation and the Museum of Jewish Heritage are joining forces on July 12 to host the official New York City premiere of My Name Is Sara, a feature film based on the true story of a young girl’s survival during the Holocaust while hiding in plain sight in the Ukrainian countryside. Produced in association with USC Shoah Foundation, the film was an Official Selection at over 50 festivals internationally, taking home five Best Feature Awards. Strand Releasing will bring the movie to New York theatres on July 13, 2022 and nationwide beginning July 22, 2022.

George reflects on the importance of learning from the Holocaust and working to make the world a better place.