The University of Michigan- Flint held its second annual Workshop on Teaching and Working with Survivor Testimonies this week, which included exploration of Rwandan and Holocaust survivor testimonies.

On July 20, 1944, a bomb exploded at Adolf Hitler’s headquarters in East Prussia. This plot was attempted by the German military to assassinate Hitler to gain control of the German government. Lisa Slater was at Hitler’s headquarters that day and recalls the chaos and consequences of the failed plot.

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.

Some of the brightest college students in applied mathematics are working with the USC Shoah Foundation this summer for the annual Research in Industrial Projects (RIPS) program at the UCLA Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM).

Lesly Culp, is USC Shoah Foundation’s Director of Education. In her role, she leads the educational strategic plan to make audiovisual testimonies and interactive biographies of survivors and witnesses of genocide and mass atrocity accessible to educators and students worldwide.

The statistics are rolling in: Thousands of rockets fired, thousands of homes destroyed, 65,000 reservists deployed, hundreds of Palestinian and tens of Israeli dead, miles of print, hours of commentary, two ceasefires. But for all our statistics, are we not missing one fundamental point? No one is suffering more at the hands of Hamas than the ordinary people of Gaza.

In the summer of 1944 members of the International Red Cross visited Theresienstadt (Terezín) ghetto in Czechoslovakia. In an effort to present Theresienstadt as a model ghetto, the Nazis deported many Jews to Auschwitz to alleviate overcrowding, renovated buildings and staged musical performances and other activities. Margot Friedlander remembers when the Red Cross visited the ghetto and speaks on the façade.

Young people working to promote peace in Rwanda as part of the Aegis Trust Youth Champion program are turning to IWitness to aid in their projects.

The number of people who watched testimony in the 2013-14 fiscal year more than doubled from last year, USC Shoah Foundation’s year-end statistics reveal. And that’s just one of many impressive numbers that show how USC Shoah Foundation continues to grow its influence around the world.

Robert Fleisher describes what it was like living in Vienna, Austria during World War I, including the grim conditions and turmoil the country faced during the war and thereafter.

Harry Reicher, USC Shoah Foundation’s first-ever Rutman Teaching Fellow, wrapped up his four-day fellowship today with a talk that revealed how exceptionally valuable the Visual History Archive will become to his teaching.

Henry Rosmarin remembers when he was called into the commandant’s quarters at Dyhernfurth concentration camp in Germany late one night and told to play a musical piece by Schubert on the harmonica. Henry credits his musical skills on saving his life. Henry’s testimony clip is featured in the book, Testimony – The Legacy of Schindler’s List and the USC Shoah Foundation.  

In just a few short months I will be holding a new born baby in my arms. The depth and complexity of emotion that I feel as this time approaches is multiplied by the experiences I have had working at USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education. New acquaintances who inquire about what I do for a living often respond by saying, “Gosh, that must be depressing.” And my response has always been the same, “Actually, it is amazing and inspiring.” And it truly is.

The second IWitness educator workshop in Rwanda will be held next week, and will incorporate new elements to provide an experience unique from the first workshop last November.

In the Spring 2014 issue of PastForward, USC screenwriting professor Ted Braun discusses Joshua Oppenheimer's The Act of Killing and what it brings to our understanding of violence.

Alexovics Ingrid írása a vizuális archívumok oktatási célú felhasználásának lehetőségeiről

Kizito Kalima speaks on how he received an athletic scholarship while living in a refugee camp, which eventually led to his immigration to America. He also describes how playing basketball was a positive outlet for him as a young man.  

Hank Schwab describes the structure of his primary and high school in Germany. He also reflects on the close relationships he formed with his Jewish and gentile classmates. Schwab and fellow survivors returned to Germany for the first time since WWII, for their 50th high school reunion.

Students may still be enjoying their summer vacation, but the new school year is just around the corner. USC Shoah Foundation has prepared a convenient one-stop-shop of all its educational resources to help educators plan to teach with testimony this year.

Joel Citron is CEO of Tenth Avenue Holdings. Citron has served on the Board of Directors of several public and private companies in Europe and the U.S. Citron is also actively involved in philanthropy. He is currently President of the Board of Trustees at the Abraham Joshua Heschel School in New York (N-12th grade), a board member of USC Shoah Foundation and Starfall Education Foundation. Citron holds an MA in Economics and a BSc in Business Administration from the University of Southern California.

USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education was founded to capture the voices, emotions and faces of those who suffered, yet miraculously survived the most heinous crime ever committed against humanity by humanity. The idea was to record individual and collective memories that would be preserved in perpetuity as a seminal educational tool to inform current and future generations that incitement, hate and violence against a person or a group can ultimately lead to death, genocide and ultimately extermination.

A series of Croatian-language Holocaust lessons commissioned in 2006 by the Croatian Ministry of Science, Education and Sports is now available on USC Shoah Foundation’s website. The lessons draw on testimony to teach various aspects of the Holocaust in Croatia.

USC and UCLA may be rivals on the football field, but they came together for a very important cause last week - the Armenian Genocide collection.

Jewish survivor Felix Flicker joined the Soviet Armed Forces in 1943. Flicker recalls arriving at Majdanek concentration camp after it was liberated in July 1944. He describes the prisoners looking like skeletons and the arrests and executions of the camp guards.

On August 2nd, 1944 the Zigeunerlager (known as the Gypsy famliy camp) in Auschwitz- Birkeanau was liquidated and about 3,000 Sinti and Roma men, women and children were sent to the gas chambers. In honor of the Sinti and Roma victims in the Holocaust, survivors Wladyslaw Gunman, Anna Kwiatkowska and Marianna Koniak speak about their experiences with discrimination, restrictions, deportations and mass murder.

A group of men is placed in several trucks. They are driven through the streets and out of town into an open area surrounded by trees. They are beaten around the head with rifle butts, made to run in a group towards an open mass grave. A mere handful of armed guards make them lie in the grave like sardines. Then they are shot one by one in broad daylight. The horrific spectacle, highly reminiscent of the Nazi Einsatzgruppen Aktions in the Soviet Union in 1941, was, in fact, the mass murder of some 30 men that took place in Iraq just this week. 

July 24, 2014: Harry Reicher, Professor of Law at University of Pennsylvania and USC Shoah Foundation's inaugural Rutman Teaching Fellow, utilized his fellowship to collect Holocaust survivor testimony content he could utilize in his classes, which currently make liberal use of multimedia content.Featuring historical footage, Nazi propaganda film, modern cinema clips, and Visual History Archive testimony, Reicher's lecture provided an overview of the Nazi legal system and demonstrated the value of film in teaching this subject.

Leo Hymas, United States Armed Forces and Buchenwald camp liberator speaks only for the second time in his life about a particular combat operation in Düsseldorf, Germany. This testimony clip was featured in the lesson, Heroes, from Teaching with Testimony in the 21st Century.

One year after learning how to incorporate testimony into their lesson plans, the 2013 Teaching with Testimony in the 21st Century graduates in Hungary returned for a follow-up session to share the lessons they have now piloted in their classrooms.