More than 13,000 pre-service and in-service educators and community leaders have been trained on Echoes and Reflections, a multimedia curriculum on the Holocaust created by the the Anti-Defamation League, the USC Shoah Foundation Institute, and Yad Vashem.

USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research Director Wolf Gruner will present a paper at the fourth international interdisciplinary conference and workshop on The Future of Holocaust Testimonies in Akko, Israel on March 8, 2016.

Our 10-part Echoes and Reflections series continues with Lesson 6: Jewish Resistance.

Clara Isaacman (née Heller) est née à Borsa, en Roumanie, avant la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Sa famille quitte la Roumanie à cause de l’antisémitisme rampant et rejoint Anvers (Belgique) à la fin des années 1920, alors que Clara n’est encore qu’une enfant. Le père de Clara, Shalom, est diamantaire et possède une fabrique de soude. Clara fréquente une école hébraïque et une école publique à Anvers.

Organized by the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research

Today is International Women’s Day and this year we are honoring girls—from Holocaust Europe to Africa, from Central America to the Middle East, from occupied China to pre-war Armenia—who demonstrated extraordinary strength and resilience in the face of unimaginable horrors. Here is a selection of USC Shoah Foundation clips and films to mark the occasion.

Archive features testimonials of survivors.

Raíssa Alonso, a PhD candidate in Social History at the University of São Paulo, Brazil, has been awarded the 2022-2023 Margee and Douglas Greenberg Research Fellowship at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research. She will be in residence at the Center in March 2023 to conduct research for her dissertation, “The ‘Other Germany’ in Brazil and the United States: Intellectuals in Exile and the Fight Against Nazism (1933-1959).”

Paul Engel was born into a middle-class Jewish family on May 4, 1922 in Vienna, Austria. He had a younger brother, Robert. When World War I broke out in 1914, his father, Eduard, was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army. Captured as a prisoner of war, he spent six years in Siberia working in a coal mine, finally reuniting with his family in 1920. In Vienna, Eduard owned a perfume wholesale business. Before the war, Paul attended a primary school and was accepted to a Gymnasium in the 14th district of Vienna.

Auschwitz: The Past is Present will support official activities of the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the German Nazi concentration and extermination camp.

A new anthology "From Testimony to Story: Video Interviews about Nazi Crimes: Perspectives and Experiences in Four Countries" includes two chapters about USC Shoah Foundation, written by its regional consultants in Czech Republic and Poland.

United Nations, USC Shoah Foundation Institute, and Yad Vashem to release new educational resource.

This webinar examines the stories of Black G.I.s featured in Echoes & Reflections who liberated concentration camps, including Leon Bass and Paul Parks. It will also focus on the experience of facing the reality of Nazi genocide, while balancing the impact of discrimination and violence at home in the United States.

Griffin Williams is challenging assumptions held by some of the most famous names in Holocaust scholarship as a DEFY Undergraduate Research Fellow at USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research this summer.

Board of Councilors member William P. Lauder has been part of USC Shoah Foundation from its very beginning, when founder Steven Spielberg asked him to support a collection of interviews with Holocaust survivors. “We met on the Amblin backlot, in a conference room with a whiteboard that had upcoming movie ideas on it,” Lauder recalls. Over the next two decades, those interviews grew into the Visual History Archive, and Lauder has steadfastly backed the Institute ever since.

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

We continue the 10-part Echoes and Reflections series with Lesson 5: The "Final Solution."

USC Shoah Foundation is saddened to learn about the passing of Max Glauben, a child survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, the Majdanek and Dachau concentration camps, and a veteran of the United States Army. In 2018, Max was interviewed by USC Shoah Foundation, in association with the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum—a center he helped found—for the interactive Dimensions in Testimony exhibit. He recorded his original video testimony for USC Shoah Foundation in Dallas, Texas in 1996.

A team of eight staff members from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Levine Institute for Holocaust Education is responsible for bringing the Some Were Neighbors IWitness activity to life.

Echoes and Reflections reaches 10,000th educator.

The lecture will discuss how the East Galician town of Buczacz was transformed from a site of coexistence, where Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews had lived side-by-side for centuries, into a site of genocide.

A lecture by Teresa Walch (University of California, San Diego) 2016-2017 Robert J. Katz Research Fellow in Genocide Studies    

Hela Goldstein’s testimony given to the British Film and Photographic Unit on April 24, 1945 is believed to be the first-ever audio-visual testimony given by a Holocaust survivor. As a 22-year old victim, she spoke from Bergen-Belsen, the Nazi concentration camp where she was imprisoned upon liberation. Standing at the foot of a mass grave with her killers before her, Hela recounted what she experienced. By telling her story in the face of death, she became a foremother of testimony.

Yad Vashem has collected approximately 4.8 million pages of testimony that restore the personal identities and record the brief life stories of the six million Jews who perished at the hands of the Nazis. In honor of Yom HaShoah—Israel’s Day of Holocaust Remembrance—this webinar, led by a Yad Vashem educator, will highlight survivor testimony from Echoes & Reflections, and pages of testimony from Yad Vashem’s archive, to examine the importance of memory and how it serves us and future generations, to create a better world. This webinar is open to teachers and their students.

Los Angeles, Jan. 9, 2015 – USC Shoah Foundation and USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism will present an advance screening on Jan. 15 of “Voices of Auschwitz,” a new CNN documentary telling the stories of four survivors from the Nazi German Concentration and extermination camp. The hour-long special is hosted by CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer, himself the son of Holocaust survivors.The 6 p.m. event at the newly opened Wallis Annenberg Hall is free and open to the public.

USC Shoah Foundation has published a new online exhibit and two new IWitness activities that expand the Institute’s educational offerings in terms of language and subject matter.

A public lecture by Jean-Marc Dreyfus (University of Manchester, United Kingdom)                                                            2018-2019 Center Research Fellow

What makes Gad Beck’s story so remarkable, however, was that not only was he a “Mischling” but he was also a gay teenager living in Nazi Berlin, the epicenter of a military power antagonistic to both Jews and gays.

Marisa Fox-Bevilacqua grew up never knowing that her mother was a Holocaust survivor. That is, until a series of discoveries after her mother’s death led her to the truth: her mother had survived Gabersdorf, a slave labor camp for Jewish girls and young women, for four and a half years – and had never said a word about it.

The IWitness team has added 52 new clips to the Watch page. These clips cover a wide range of topics, from the Armenian Genocide to the Nanjing Massacre.