To commemorate International Women’s Day, March 8, 2015, listen to the testimonies of 10 amazing women from the Visual History Archive who all “made it happen,” from standing up to injustice to saving lives during the Holocaust to preserving the memories of genocide victims and many other courageous acts.

Suzette Sheft first recognized the importance of recording family history when it was already too late. As a young child, the New York City student had regularly listened to her father’s stories, but when he died of pancreatic cancer when she was just 13, she realized she was unable to remember many of them. “When he was alive, he would tell me stories about his life while tucking me in each night, but in the months following his death, I found myself forgetting many of his recollections,” Suzette said.

Rescue is a crucial topic in understanding genocide survival and appreciating the difficult choices that people make in extreme circumstances. Although many stories of survival during the Holocaust are due to unexplained and unexplainable circumstances, there are also numerous accounts of individual and group acts of aid and rescue that contributed to the survival of thousands of Jewish people.

Chava Kwinta remembers the hidden messages that were exchanged from prisoners in Auschwitz with the Poles just outside of the camp. This was how people began to find out what was really happening inside of the camps. This clip is part of the Visual History Archive's Alex Dworkin Canadian Jewish Archives collection.

In this lecture, Gabór Tóth discussed the ways text and data mining technology has helped to recover fragments of lost experiences of Nazi persecution out of oral history interviews with survivors. He also demonstrated how a data-driven anthology of these fragments has been built.

In his 1994 testimony, Mel recounts how he won a lawsuit in the 1980s against a group of Holocaust deniers who run the Institute for Historical Review in southern California. Watch his full testimony on the Visual History Archive Online.

The Scholar Lab on Antisemitism gathers six scholars from different academic backgrounds, including history, digital humanities, communication, musicology, religious studies, Judaic studies, Holocaust studies, and media studies, who all examine the topic of antisemitism from their respective disciplinary and methodological perspectives. You can learn more about the scholars and their projects below.

Steven Spielberg’s Seven-Time Academy Award®-Winning Masterpiece Arrives in Theaters for a Limited Theatrical Engagement. USC Shoah Foundation is Coordinating Free Screenings for High School Educators and Students in Select North American Theaters on Dec. 4 and 5.

Check out our year in review of the Institute's work in 2018, including stories about our new collection of testimonies from survivors of anti-Rohingya violence and the work we have done with the United Nations.

The USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research invites proposals for its 2017-2018 Rutman Fellowship for Research and Teaching that will provide summer support for one member of the University of Pennsylvania faculty to integrate testimonies from the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive (VHA) into a new or existing course. The fellowship is open to all disciplinary and methodological approaches and will be awarded on a competitive basis to the most interesting project.

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.

Cuellar is researching the experiences of women and girls in scorched earth campaigns in Guatemala and El Salvador.

USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research staff took their first trip to the American University of Paris (AUP) last month, the first visit since a partnership between the two organizations was announced.

Learn about the 10 educational resources that USC Shoah Foundation will debut for the first 10 days of its "100 Days to Inspire Respect" program, launching January 20.

Members of London’s Armenian community learned about USC Shoah Foundation and its Armenian Genocide testimony collection at a special presentation on June 18.

Ildikó Barna, Associate Professor of Sociology, Department of Social Sciences and Program Director of the department’s Ethnic and Minority Policy MA Program at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), Budapest has been awarded the 2018-2019 International Teaching Fellowship at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research. The International Teaching Fellowship bestowed by the Center provides support for faculty at institutions that subscribe to the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive (VHA) to integrate testimonies into new or existing courses.

If listening is a form of acknowledgment, can we hear the Roma? In this talk, Ioanida Costache (PhD candidate, Stanford University) problematizes the staggering silence and forgetting surrounding Romani persecution during the Holocaust, a history that has been muted or distorted for decades.

Malmö Museums invites you to the grand opening of Speaking Memories — The Last Witnesses of the Holocaust on June 11, 2020 at 6:00 PM GMT+2 (9:00 AM PDT) at Slottsholmen, Malmö Museums Participants include:

After learning the methodology of teaching with testimony and creating new lessons last year, the 2014 cohort of Teaching with Testimony in the 21st Century in Hungary returned for their follow-up session to share what they have learned.

Benjamin Biniaz is a sophomore at Yale University. During his 2016 summer break he is interning with USC Shoah Foundation’s communication department. His family has been involved with the Institute for many years since his grandmother Celina Biniaz and great- grandmother Phyllis Karp gave their testimonies to the Visual History Archive in 1996.  

Branko Lustig, producer of Schindler’s List and our 50,000th interviewee in the Visual History Archive; recalls returning to Auschwitz during the filming of the TV mini-series War and Remembrance. Branko also describes how important it is not only to remember the Holocaust but also for future generations to learn from it.

USC Shoah Foundation archivist Sandra Aguilar interprets and formats information and details about the interviewees and the interviews to be brought into the database systems of the Visual History Archive. She is also a liaison between USC Shoah Foundation’s research specialists and database programmers to develop ways for the testimonies to be searched and experienced.

Vera Laska describes how, as a teenager, she helped Jews and French political prisoners cross the mountains from Slovakia into Hungary. This clip is part of the new Facing History and Ourselves IWitness activity Choosing to Rescue.

Professor Uğur Ümit Üngör (Utrecht University, Department of History, and NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Amsterdam) gave a public lecture about the role of paramilitary militias in cases of mass violence, focusing on the example of pro-state paramilitary violence in the Syrian conflict. The lecture is based on Professor Üngör’s forthcoming monograph of the same title, which builds upon his broader and comparative research on the global phenomenon of paramilitarism.

Psychology students and professionals in Hungary attended two seminars this fall that inspired them to use IWitness in their teaching and learning.

One of USC Shoah Foundation’s fiercest supporters will be honored with a leadership award from Hillel at Drexel University this Monday, May 22.

Chad Gibbs is a PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research and teaching interests extend from Holocaust studies to modern European Jewish history, modern Germany, memory, oral history, gender, and antisemitism. Chad’s dissertation, “Against that Darkness: Perseverance, Resistance, and Revolt at Treblinka,” investigates the spatial and social networks of Jewish resistance inside this extermination camp.

Laszlo Csatary, a former Nazi commander and the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s third Most Wanted Nazi War Criminal, died August 12 while awaiting trial in Budapest. He was 98.

Representatives from more than 30 Holocaust museums and centers in the United States and Canada came to Los Angeles this week for the 2013 Association of Holocaust Organizations (AHO) Winter Seminar, hosted for the first time by USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education.

Attendees tour Holocaust-related sites.