Belle Mayer of New York was a prosecutor on the team that tried I.G. Farben, one of Nazi Germany’s largest government contractors, which had a large stake in creating the Zyklon-B poison used in death-camp gas chambers.

Last week a group of us from USC Shoah Foundation were in Guatemala with our testimony partner, the Foundation for Forensic Anthropology in Guatemala (FAFG). We attended the funeral of a Mayan man whose remains were recently exhumed by FAFG – 36 years after he disappeared during the genocide there.

The portrait I have been working on of Dario isn’t complete yet, but what an honor it was to have met him and is now to engage with his testimony through the act of painting,” said David Kassan of hi

USC Shoah Foundation today mourns the loss of a close friend, George Weiss, a longtime volunteer with the Institute and a Holocaust survivor who endured homelessness and life on the run as a young child separated from his parents in both France and Belgium during the war. He was 87. Weiss was a familiar and beloved presence at the offices of the Institute, stopping in every week to curate and work with clips of video testimony from the Visual History Archive, which contains 55,000 life stories of survivors and witnesses to the Holocaust and other genocides.

Last month, I had the amazing opportunity to travel to Warsaw and Krakow with USC Shoah Foundation’s mission to Poland for the Auschwitz: Past is Present program, commemorating the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. I had many unforgettable experiences throughout these four days traveling and meeting incredible people who are all interested in the work of USC Shoah Foundation and its mission of changing the world through testimony.

When I met Auschwitz survivor Eva Mozes Kor in January, she was dozing on a chair that doubles as her walker, wearing a contented smile while a flurry of activity buzzed around her. 

For weeks, Eva (Geiringer) Schloss and a small band of young women had been exploring the far corners of the women’s section of Auschwitz-Birkenau, alone and, for the first time in months, unwatched. It was January 1945, and Allied forces were nearing the camp. The SS had already evacuated most of the surviving inmates by way of middle-of-the-night marches in freezing temperatures. The gas chambers and crematoria had been destroyed. The SS guards had fled.

The Holocaust collection in USC Shoah Foundation's Visual History Archive contains nearly 53,000 testimonies; however, only a mere six of those testimonies are from survivors who were persecuted by the Nazis for being gay: one in English, three in German, one in French, and one in Dutch. There are other gay survivors we have in the Archive, but they were persecuted by the Nazis for the greater sin of being Jewish; Gad Beck being one of them. The meager number says a lot about the history of the gay men who lived through the Nazi regime and who came out the other end willing and unafraid to speak about their lives.

The 2014 cohort of Teaching with Testimony in the 21st Century in Poland reunited to share the lessons they piloted in their classrooms over the past year, with impressive results.

One of the world’s leading experts on the subject of the Holocaust is coming to USC Shoah Foundation’s Center for Advanced Genocide Research, where he will further develop his current project about Jewish-Arab relations in Israel and Palestine, the Center announced today.

Starting Thursday, Tribeca Film Festival attendees will be able to walk alongside Holocaust survivor Pinchas Gutter as he tours the concentration camp where his parents and sister lost their lives during World War II.

IWitness users will notice some new features in the latest update of WeVideo. Students and teachers will enjoy new motion titles, premium music, and more advanced features like the ability to add transitions on all tracks, one of the most asked-for features from users.

Daniel Conway, Texas A&M University, and Nancy Sinkoff, Rutgers University, have both been in residence at the Center for Advanced Genocide Research this week.

“Filming the Camps” explores the World War II experiences of Hollywood directors John Ford, George Stevens and Samuel Fuller.

The 1:30-3:30 p.m. panel on the second day of the Digital Approaches to Genocide Studies conference at USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research will gather three scholars who create maps, not of geographic places of genocide, but rather the personal journeys and social networks of survivors as they went on their trajectories through the Holocaust and Cambodian Genocide.

Comcast Xfinity subscribers can watch the film on-demand as part of USC Shoah Foundation’s PastFORWARD broadcast through December 29.

Jean-Marc Dreyfus, PhD, Reader in Holocaust Studies in the History department at the University of Manchester (United Kingdom) has been awarded the 2018-2019 Center Research Fellowship.

During the Institute's inaugural summer William P. Lauder Internship Program, about two-dozen young people came to USC Shoah Foundation from across the country to participate in the intensive program, which focused on the causes and impacts of injustice and the ways an individual can respond.

Call for Papers: International Conference "Memory through the Screen: Polish Cinema and WWII" October 18-19, 2018 USC Department of Slavic Language and Literature's 3rd Annual Film Conference at the University of Southern California When a film is created, it is created in a language, which is not only about words, but also the way that very language encodes our perception of the world, our understanding of it. –Andrzej Wajda  

A consortium of more than 40 Hungarian academic institutions and public libraries signs on, bringing the total number of worldwide subscribers to 138.

USC Shoah Foundation Executive Director Stephen Smith gave the keynote address at a conference with Holocaust educators located at the site of the Warsaw Ghetto. In the U.K, he attended events celebrating the launch of the Visual History Archive at the University of Oxford. USC Shoah Foundation Director of Global Outreach Karen Jungblut was also in Poland and then attended an event in Hungary to celebrate the launch of the Visual History Archive at 40 Hungarian institutions.

Public lecture by Danielle Willard-Kyle (PhD candidate, Rutgers University) 2019 Center Graduate Research Fellow

We commemorate the students and teachers who were killed on Feb. 14, 2018 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, and we gratefully acknowledge the class of Ivy Schamis, the recipient of USC Shoah Foundation’s inaugural Stronger Than Hate Educator Award.

Museum Visitors engage with Interactive Biography of Acclaimed Cellist and German-Born Holocaust Survivor Anita Lasker Wallfisch.

Alan Auyeung pulled on a pair of latex gloves and a N95 face mask. For good measure, he placed a pair of protective goggles over his eyes too. A trip to the supermarket? In these Covid-19 times, it could have been but, in fact, Auyeung was preparing for a task of quite a different nature: saving the testimonies of Holocaust survivors, whose eye witness accounts of Nazi atrocities were at risk of being eaten away by mold.

We are very saddened at the USC Shoah Foundation to learn that our friend and Holocaust survivor Itka Zygmuntowicz passed away October 9, 2020, at the age of 94.

USC Shoah Foundation and Discovery Education today launched the fourth annual Stronger Than Hate Challenge offering students the opportunity to win $10,000 in prizes. The challenge encourages students aged 13-18 in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada to work individually or in groups of 2-4 on multimedia projects that demonstrate the power of story to create a community that is stronger than hate.

The USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research is proud to announce its cooperation with a German government funded multi-institutional Holocaust research project entitled #LastSeen - Pictures of Nazi Deportations.

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. 

The USC Shoah Foundation mourns the passing of Dr. Abner Delman, a cardiologist and longtime supporter of the USC Shoah Foundation. He was 93. Abner's wife, Ilse-Lore Delman, was a Holocaust survivor who fled her hometown to escape Nazi persecution at a young age. She spent three years in hiding. In 1998, Ilse recorded her testimony with the USC Shoah Foundation, and soon after, the couple became involved with the organization.