May 18, 2016

5 -6:30 p.m.

UC Irvine, Merage School Auditorium (SB1, First Floor, Room 1200)

Speaker: Stephen Smith, Executive Director, USC Shoah Foundation

Maël LeNoc is a PhD Candidate in Geography at Texas State University. He holds undergraduate degrees in History and Geography from Rennes 2 University in France, and a Master’s degree in Geography from Texas State University, for which he received Outstanding Master’s Thesis Award in Digital Scholarship from the Conference of Southern Graduate School. LeNoc co-authored three scholarly publications, presented at a number of conferences, and received many fellowships.

Wolf Gruner, director of USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research, continues his two-month residence at the Berlin-Brandenurg Center for Jewish Studies with a lecture about Jewish resistance and a Visual History Archive workshop for researchers next Thursday, July 9.

Gisela Golombek’s Jewish family had immigrated to the Philippines via Britain after fleeing Nazi Germany just before the war. On Dec. 8, 1941 – the same day as Pearl Harbor – Japan attacked Manila. The 9-year-old Golombek and her family were among the thousands of Americans and Europeans rounded up from Manila homes. They were imprisoned at the Santo Tomas Internment Camp in Manila.

 

Harold Alexander fled Nazi controlled Germany to the United States and then joined the United States Army. He returned to Germany towards the end of WWII as an American soldier and met a Jewish woman who was still in hiding. He remembers helping the woman and her family by bringing them a truck full of food and connecting them to family in the United States.

Ann Monka was born in Lida a small town with a prosperous Jewish population in Poland. Ann and her mother were separated from her brother, sister and father after escaping the Lida Ghetto. Ann remembers when she and her mother hid in the Polish forests with the Bielski Partisans, while the rest of her family escaped deportations by jumping from the Nazi transport trains.

We are grateful that so many of these survivors, partners, friends, and family members have entrusted us to share their stories for future generations, and for the passion and dedication they brought in support of our mission.

Today, on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, a complex of concentration and extermination camps, we take the time to honor the millions of victims of the Holocaust by listening to those who survived these atrocities, and using their remarkable testimonies of survival and loss to cultivate empathy and respect in future generations so that these atrocities may never happen again.

“History shows that the only way to stop genocide is to sound the alarm before it is too late.” 

As an educator who has used IWitness to teach various subjects, units and topics here are some tips to integrating testimony into any curriculum, including Science.
Longtime USC Shoah Foundation board member Mickey Shapiro has given a gift to fund an endowed research fellowship program at the Institute’s Center for Advanced Genocide Research in honor of his parents, Sara and Asa Shapiro, who both survived the Holocaust.