President Paul Kagame visited USC Shoah Foundation on Wednesday to learn more about the Institute’s work linking testimony, technology and education.

Dimensions in Testimony highlights “Speaking Memories,” an exhibit by the organization Jewish Culture in Sweden featuring the voices and stories of Holocaust survivors. The Swedish History Museum also launched access to the 55,000 testimonies in the Institute’s Visual History Archive.

The four scholars who two years ago found their research transformed by the Visual History Archive will return to USC Shoah Foundation for a public presentation and a week of conducting new research.

USC Shoah Foundation and The Latin American Network for Education on the Shoah (Red LAES) today launch an educational partnership dedicated to the study, teaching, and dissemination of Spanish-language Holocaust testimonies in Latin America. The new initiative, announced to coincide with Yom HaShoah, will undertake a range of innovative activities including the creation of a landing page on USC Shoah Foundation’s award-winning IWitness platform that will feature downloadable Spanish-language modules based on testimonies from the 56,000-strong Visual History Archive.

Fifteen hours of interviews related to a group of World War II-era diplomats who defied official policies to save hundreds of thousands of people from the Holocaust are to be integrated into the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive.

Gerald Szames is 2, maybe 3 years old. He is standing at the foot of the bed, looking at his mother. She is sick, propped up on a pile of pillows. He has other flashes of memories of life before the Nazis invaded his Polish shtetl of Trochenbrod in 1941, when he was four years old – his grandfather taking him to the mill, his father lifting him up to give him a candy and a kiss.

Just one month after IWalk launched in Czech Republic, a second resource is already being developed. The city of Brno, in the Southern Moravia region of the country, will join Prague in offering downloadable testimony clip reels of Holocaust survivor testimonies that students may watch as they visit relevant historical sites.

Although the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive is typically thought of as a way to preserve the stories of people who survived the Holocaust, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania has found a way to use the Archive to broaden the scope of memory to include not only survivors but also people who perished.

Alberto Innocenti, grandfather of Francesca Innocenti, secretly hid Jewish people -- including members of his wife’s family -- in his apartment during World War II. For this and other acts of heroism the Catholic Italian was recognized posthumously by Yad Vashem.

USC Shoah Foundation will return to China, where it has collected some of its newest testimonies, to participate in University of Southern California’s Global Conference 2015.

The Institute is sad to learn that world champion swimmer and Holocaust survivor Éva Székely passed away at 92.

This month, the 2017-2019 Interdisciplinary Research Week team came together again for their second weeklong residency at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research.

A lecture by Maximilian Strnad (University of Munich)Doheny Memorial Library, Room 240

As a survivor of the genocide, Rosalina Tuyuc Velásquez fully understands the complexities involved not only in surviving such an atrocity, but also in healing and moving forward.

Barnabas Balint, a PhD candidate at Magdalen College at the University of Oxford, UK, has been awarded the 2021-2022 Breslauer, Rutman, and Anderson Research Fellowship at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research. He will be in residence at the Center during Spring 2022 in order to conduct research for his dissertation, which is entitled “Accelerated Development into Adulthood: The Changing Roles of Young Hungarians During the Holocaust.”

USC Shoah Foundation is saddened by the recent loss of Eva Kor, a Holocaust survivor who – along with her twin sister – endured cruel experiments conducted on her at Auschwitz, and, half a century later, sparked controversy by publicly forgiving the Nazis who tormented her and killed her parents and two older sisters. She went on to found CANDLES Museum and Education Center in Indiana.

Wolf Gruner is the founding director of the Center. He developed the vision and main features of its now internationally recognized innovative academic program.

Join USC Shoah Foundation for an informative conversation with International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA)’s Executive Secretary Kathrin Meyer, PhD, on Friday, June 17 in USC’s Leavey Library.

Panama’s Jewish community is commemorating Yom HaShoah virtually this year with a week-long series of thematic Instagram posts that will integrate clips from USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive. In memory of the six million killed, Panama Friends of Yad Vashem coordinated a six-day campaign focused on survivor families in Panama, the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, and community commemorations of Yom HaShoah.

It was not easy for the more than 52,000 Holocaust survivors and witnesses in our Visual History Archive to tell their stories. But they did it, because they understood the importance of preserving these painful memories for future generations. We are those future generations, and it is our turn to carry their stories and messages of strength and resilience forward.

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.

Join the USC Shoah Foundation and the Museum of Jewish Heritage for a panel discussion about the impact and legacy of Schindler’s List on its 30th anniversary.

  Call for Papers: The Future of Holocaust Testimonies V: An International Conference and Workshop March 11-13, 2019  The Holocaust Studies Program of Western Galilee College, the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research, University of Southern California, and the Center for Judaic, Holocaust and Peace Studies, Appalachian State University, announce the fifth international interdisciplinary conference and workshop on The Future of Holocaust Testimonies to be held on 11–13 March 2019 in Akko, Israel.  

Jewish Holocaust SurvivorInterview language: PortugueseIn 1944, Augusta Glaz was interrogated for 5 days by the Gestapo in Brussels, Belgium, where she was brutally treated. She was then taken to the Mechelen Concentration Camp, also known as Malines, where she was placed in an underground bunker built especially for female political prisoners. There, she remained for 30 days.

Seventy-seven years ago today, the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games commenced in Germany. Memories of the XI Olympiad loom large in many Holocaust survivors’ minds: 171 testimonies in USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education’s Visual History Archive (VHA) mention the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games.

Welcome to Through Testimony, the official blog of USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education.

Educators from around the world had the opportunity to learn more about IWitness at the Annual Convention of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Nov. 20-23 in Washington, D.C.

Rukesha’s testimony, along with six other interviews from The 600 documentary, was recently integrated into USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive, which now holds 135 indexed and searchable interviews connected to the Genocide Against the Tutsi Rwanda. The majority of these testimonies were collected by Aegis Trust and the Kigali Genocide Memorial, in partnership with USC Shoah Foundation. The seven new testimonies include the first accounts of Rwandan liberators to be added to the collection.

The conference hosted by USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research began in earnest Monday morning with a fascinating and at times heart-wrenching presentation by Freddy Peccerelli, executive director of Fundacion de Antropologia Forense de Guatemala (FAFG).

Move-in day for students at the University of Southern California this week led to a remarkable small-world moment between two strangers with ties to the Holocaust in the public-exhibit space of USC Shoah Foundation’s lobby. Fifty-eight-year-old Alexander Moissis of the San Francisco Bay Area and his wife were helping their freshman son move into a dormitory when Alexander decided to steal away for a few minutes to visit USC Shoah Foundation, which is located on campus next to the dorm.