From visiting family in China during summer breaks growing up, I became acutely aware of the devastation and suffering that occurred during the Japanese occupation of our hometown of Nanjing. Museums, movies, television programs, and commemorative art kept the Nanjing Massacre alive in public memory. But what I also noticed, from visits to museums, shuffling through television channels, and discussions with family, was the seeming absence of Chinese resistance.

USC Shoah Foundation–the Institute for Visual History and Education (USC Shoah Foundation) on Wednesday welcomed Second Gentleman Douglas Emhoff to the Institute’s global headquarters on the campus of the University of Southern California.  

Howard Gillman, Dean of USC College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, announces newly appointed leadership positions of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute’s Board of Councilors.

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.

In 2003, I and others were preparing for the opening of the Kigali Genocide Memorial to commemorate the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda when a volunteer data collector emptied the contents of a brown manila envelope onto my desk. There on top of the pile of papers and photos was a photo of two little girls.

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.”

Holocaust Remembrance Day, or Yom HaShoah as it’s known in Hebrew, commemorates and honors the victims and survivors of the Holocaust. This year, people around the world will remember the victims of the Holocaust April 23- 24, 2017.

Annabel Carballo-Mesa is a PhD candidate at the University of Barcelona. Since January 17 she has been in Los Angeles conducting research with Visual History Archive (VHA) testimonies for a dissertation provisionally entitled “Na Bister! (Don’t Forget!) An Oral History of the Roma and Sinti Genocide”.

"Research With Testimonies: Featuring the Center's 2021 Lev Student Research Fellows” Nicholas Bredie (USC PhD candidate in Literature and Creative Writing) and Atharva Tewari (USC undergraduate student, Global Studies and Journalism major) 2021 Beth and Arthur Lev Student Research Fellow  April 12, 2022

The ten documentary films feature firsthand accounts from individual survivors and witnesses of their personal experiences during the Holocaust, and are all presented by the USC Shoah Foundation Institute. This is the first time these films will be offered as a complete package to a U.S. television audience.

In January 2014, four scholars from the “Holocaust Geographies Collaborative”—an international, interdisciplinary group of researchers evaluated the link between personal testimony, the index of the archive and geography.

In December 1995, USC Shoah Foundation, then called, Survivors of the Shoah Foundation, held a training session for interviewers in Buenos Aires; bringing together people from different countries of Latin America. The Foundation had just started to collect the survivors’ testimonies throughout the world and was about to start recording testimonies in Brazil.

A photography exhibit that incorporates testimony from the Visual History Archive is now on display in Moscow following its debut in Prague last spring.

Matsuoka interviewed hundreds of Nanjing Massacre survivors and perpetrators and is nicknamed "the conscience of Japan."

USC Shoah Foundation’s interactive New Dimensions in Testimony proved once again to be a popular and educational way to learn about the Holocaust when it was presented at the Future of StoryTelling Festival (FoST FEST) in New York earlier this month.

The contest aims to perpetuate in students the memory of the resistance and the deportation in France during the Holocaust so that they can draw inspiration from it and draw civic lessons from it in their lives today.

The opening panel of the second day of the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research’s Digital Holocaust Studies conference will focus on the innovative ways researchers are representing the Holocaust visually, using the latest data visualization techniques and tools.

Living through the Holocaust was such a strange and overwhelming experience, survivors often found it difficult to find ways to describe it. In her lecture “Phantom Geographies in Representations of the Holocaust” hosted by USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Studies on March 22, Kathryn Brackney identified survivors who talked about living in a world outside of time and place, where even the laws of nature fell apart.

A public lecture by Samuel Kassow (Trinity College).

The screening Thursday will include a question-and-answer period with producer Andi Gitow of USC Shoah Foundation

Kimberly Cheng’s lecture, “American Dreams: Jewish Refugees and Chinese Locals in Post-World War II Shanghai,” examined the collision of cultures in Shanghai, which was significantly influenced first by the persecution of Chinese by Japanese invaders throughout the country, then by the influx of Jewish refugees, and after the war ended, by the arrival and presence of U.S. troops.

Holocaust Survivor Judah Samet first gave testimony to USC Shoah Foundation in 1997. In 2019, as part of the CATT testimony collection, he spoke to us again. This time Judah wasn’t talking about his experiences in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen.

USC Shoah Foundation continues to record interviews with Holocaust survivors as part of the Last Chance Testimony Collection initiative, an urgent effort to give voice to survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust with the goal of educating people around the globe.

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.

Seventy-five years ago this week, Nazi Germany entered Austria. With most Austrians in support of the move, the country was incorporated into Germany on March 13, 1938.

A knight of the British Empire and an Olympic athlete recorded two of the newest testimonies for USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive.

The new Museum of the History of the Polish Jews in Warsaw is now offering educational programming for students that uses the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive.

The email wasn’t so different from many others I’ve received since I started working at the USC Shoah Foundation last summer. A woman named Olga in Germany was moved by watching survivor Paula Lebovics talk about her stolen childhood during the Holocaust. Olga had a young daughter of her own and felt an immediate bond with Paula, who was taken to Auschwitz when she was the same age. And so she wanted to contact her.

Clara Isaacman (née Heller) est née à Borsa, en Roumanie, avant la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Sa famille quitte la Roumanie à cause de l’antisémitisme rampant et rejoint Anvers (Belgique) à la fin des années 1920, alors que Clara n’est encore qu’une enfant. Le père de Clara, Shalom, est diamantaire et possède une fabrique de soude. Clara fréquente une école hébraïque et une école publique à Anvers.