Growing up, it wasn’t terribly unusual to see people in our house with telltale tattoos on their arms. We kids somehow knew what those blurry inked numbers meant, but we also knew it wasn’t polite to ask about them. And so, I never did. And honestly, no one in my family had been so marked — the people with tattoos were mostly friends of my grandparents — so it wasn’t something I had a lot of interest in hearing about. And perhaps in an effort to protect our innocence, family elders showed no interest in talking about it.

Archive features testimonials of survivors.

The designers at Olson, an advertising and digital agency in Minneapolis, typically spend their days creating ad campaigns for clients including McDonalds, Target and General Mills. But for the last six months, a team from Olson has undertaken a project of an entirely different sort.

I was born and brought up in a university town in the Czech Republic called Olomouc. It had a small Jewish community.   My father is a writer and academic.  Five years ago he interviewed Milos Dobry who was a prominent member of the Olomouc Jewish community and a long-term Holocaust survivor.  His story was fascinating - about how he and his brother had survived Terezín and Auschwitz and how Milos had gone on to have a successful career as an inventor and sports personality.  I went to meet Milos Dobry personally to further interview him about his history.

USC students have until March 16, 2015 to enter this year’s Student Voices Short Film Contest.

Auschwitz: The Past is Present has left Australian teacher Christine Cole with a new motto and new motivation for imparting the lessons of the Holocaust on her students.

Two classes on opposite sides of the world completed an upcoming IWitness activity inspired by USC Shoah Foundation's social media campaign.

They have gathered on living room sofas, on university lawns, in synagogue sanctuaries, in public squares, and even in embassy conference rooms for intimate conversations that have a resounding global impact. Since 2011, more than 2 million people have met with Holocaust survivors to learn about their experiences and to help carry their histories and their hopes into the future.

Join leading experts, prominent scholars, and international diplomats to examine how existing legal mechanisms, international policies, and cooperation can be strengthened and expanded to meet the fundamental challenges of our time.

Over the last few days I’ve overheard my grandmother and father talk endlessly about Celia Tiano, an Auschwitz survivor from Salonika, Greece, their next-door neighbor on 7th Avenue -- a quiet block in the Hyde Park area of L.A., during the 1950s and 60s. After more than 40 years, my family has reconnected with Celia -- through testimony. We were able to make this connection because of a film project I had been working on for the Student Voices Short Film Contest.

Seeing new students starting their fall semester at USC – my recent alma mater – gives me a strange feeling. I have worked at USC Shoah Foundation during most of my career as an USC undergraduate student, and now I am about to step away from my favorite university and nonprofit organization. I’ve learned invaluable life lessons from video testimony as well as my wonderful coworkers.

Modern methods of analyzing thousands of Holocaust survivor testimonies contained in collections such as the Visual History Archive present a challenge that is at once ethical and technological: how to listen to thousands of testimonies of Holocaust survivors as an integral body of voices and stories rather than a collection of fragmentary items in a database. In this talk, Hebrew University Researchers Renana Keydar and Eitan Wagner will examine the meeting point between testimony and computation, the new possibilities inherent in such an encounter, and the challenges and risks involved.

Martha Stroud manages the day-to-day operations of the Center for Advanced Genocide Research, which advances innovative interdisciplinary research on the Holocaust and other genocides and promotes use of the Visual History Archive in research and teaching. She joined the Center in 2015 after earning her PhD in Medical Anthropology at UC Berkeley.

Maria talks about her aunt Adele Bloch-Bauer, who was painted by Gustav Kilmt in his “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer.” Nazi soldiers confiscated the painting at the start of WWII and after the war, the Austrian State Gallery claimed the painting as its own. Years later, Altmann fought to get the painting back for her family and she went before the U.S. Supreme Court in 2004. Ultimately, it was decided that the painting be sold to the Neue Galerie in New York City, and is currently worth $135 million. This is a part of the USC Shoah Foundation’s Women’s History Month Clip series.

English Translation: “Always remember what happened. Don't ever forget it, even if it starts becoming just part of history. Don't ever forget and, hopefully, that it will never happen again. Even though the world sees that it is not happening against the Jews, Genocide is still taking place—as in Serbia, in Rwanda. The world does not learn as seen with the recent rebirth of Nazism with the skinheads in Germany. Hopefully, there won't be people denying the Holocaust and people claiming that the existence of gas chambers in Auschwitz- Birkenau was invented by the Jews.

Twenty-one-years after my grandmother recorded her testimony with USC Shoah Foundation, I teamed up with the Institute to create a podcast about my own decade-long journey to retrace her war story. It would be the first-ever narrative podcast to be based around survivor testimony. After years of research, criss-crossing international borders, living in stranger’s homes, and harmonizing history with the politics of today, I began to sit with her voice. “I always felt very guilty,” she told the interviewer about her survival.

This moderated discussion features Dr. Jonathan Judaken of Rhodes College and Dr. Jeffrey Veidlinger of the University of Michigan, both the members of the Scholar Lab on Antisemitism program. As part of the discussion, Dr. Judaken and Dr. Veidlinger present on their research projects examining how major theorists of antisemitism understand its underlying causes and what prominent writers and thinkers in the historical western tradition had written about Jews, respectively, focusing on what we can learn about antisemitism from these writings. The discussion is moderated by Dr.

Anna Lenchovska, M.D. in Psychology, is the international consultant in Ukraine for USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education. For nearly 10 years she has helped develop educational resources on how to use video testimonies in Ukraine classrooms.  Lenchovska also serves as executive director of the Congress of National Minorities of Ukraine. Prior to this she worked in the Ukrainian NGO “Institute of Jewish Studies” and a clinic for child psychiatry and psychotherapy.

“New Perspectives on Kristallnacht: After 80 Years, the Nazi Pogrom in Global Comparison” was an international conference held at USC. Organized by the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research and the USC Casden Institute, the conference convened 22 scholars from all over the world — the United States, Germany, Israel, the United Kingdom, and Canada.

Last night, Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation commemorated the recording of its 50,000th testimony with survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust. At a ceremony attended by over 400 people involved with the project, both at its Los Angeles headquarters and abroad, Shoah Foundation Founder and Chairman Steven Spielberg thanked everyone and announced the future direction of the organization. Spielberg told the group, "no one could have imagined the breadth of the undertaking we embarked on four years ago.

As part of the IWitness Detroit program, USC Shoah Foundation education staff hosted a half-day IWitness workshop for educators at the Macomb Intermediate School District (MISD), Michigan, last Tuesday, April 19.

IWitness has partnered with Participant Media and Bleecker Street Media to provide educational resources for the new film Denial, which tells the true story of the Holocaust denial libel trial between Deborah Lipstadt and David Irving.

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.

USC Shoah Foundation was invited to give a presentation about its IWalk program at Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum’s international education conference, “Awareness-Responsibility-Future,” earlier this week.

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.

It’s a story my grandfather never told me, something that I only heard and understood later, years after my mother recounted it. In 1943, after his first wife and children were killed, my grandfather, Sam Wasserman, participated in one of the only successful mass escapes from a Nazi extermination camp. He and hundreds of other prisoners, overwhelmed and killed several guards and escaped the Sobibor death camp in Poland. My grandfather eluded capture, joined a band of partisans fighting the Nazis, and shortly after surviving the war, met the woman who would become my grandmother.

This lecture offers an examination of pro-state paramilitary violence in the Syrian conflict. It analyzes the emergence and transformation of pro-state paramilitarism in Syria in the context of the uprising and civil war. It focuses on the Syrian government’s deployment of the Shabbiha (later renamed ‘National Defense Forces’), irregular paramilitaries dressed in civilian gear and committing a broad spectrum of violence, including torture, kidnapping, assassination, sexual violence, and a string of massacres across the country.

The USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research mourns the death of Kim Simon who for the last decade served as Managing Director of the USC Shoah Foundation. She passed away on February 28, 2023.

Having been at the Institute for 25 years, Kim Simon was involved in developing and scaling the Institute’s impact and reach globally. She directed the development and implementation of key public engagement programs that connect USC Shoah Foundation to its many distinct audiences.

Refreshments will be served.