On Monday I received a voicemail from Suzan Trevor that her father Marcus Segal had passed away. I had only just met Marcus, albeit virtually, weeks before when he shared his testimony with USC Shoah Foundation on January 26th. While saddened by the news of his passing, I’m filled with immense gratitude for having had the opportunity to hear his incredible life’s story in the final weeks of his life. 

This 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. Between 1941, when the Germans conquered the region, and 1944, when the Soviets liberated it, the entire Jewish population of Buczacz was murdered by the Nazis, with ample help from local Ukrainians, who then also ethnically cleansed the region of the Polish population. What were the reasons for this instance of communal violence, what were its dynamics, and why has it been erased from the local memory?

The existence of the city dates back at least to 12th century. Following the partition of Poland in 1772, the city was annexed to the Habsburg Austrian Empire, returning to Polish rule only after the end of WWI. During that time, Oświęcim became an industrial center and an important railroad junction. Jewish population in 1921 was 4,950. On the eve of World War II, there were about 8,000 Jews in the city, over half the whole population. Oświęcim was occupied immediately at the beginning of WWII. By October 1939, it was annexed into Greater Germany.

Julia Werner, the 2015/2016 Margee and Douglas Greenberg Research Fellow, finished up her two-and-a-half week visit to USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research last Thursday with a talk, “Beyond the Pictorial Frame: Ghettoization of the Jews in Poland,” on her research.

The second annual Robert J. Katz Research Fellow in Genocide Studies will be Kathryn Brackney, a Ph.D. candidate in history at Yale University.

One would think that the grandson of four Polish Holocaust survivors would have an in-depth knowledge of the Shoah, but it was quite the contrary. The Holocaust was a topic that was never discussed when I was growing up. When it was introduced, it was in the most unconventional way, through satire film and television. I knew this was just a facade draped over the painful truth.

USC Shoah Foundation and the Museum of Jewish Heritage are joining forces on July 12 to host the official New York City premiere of My Name Is Sara, a feature film based on the true story of a young girl’s survival during the Holocaust while hiding in plain sight in the Ukrainian countryside. Produced in association with USC Shoah Foundation, the film was an Official Selection at over 50 festivals internationally, taking home five Best Feature Awards. Strand Releasing will bring the movie to New York theatres on July 13, 2022 and nationwide beginning July 22, 2022.

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.

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.

In the Spring 2014 issue of PastForward, Holocaust survivor Roman Kent shares his story of survival, education and one very special dog.

Discover the testimonies of Holocaust survivors who share memories of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, which is commemorating its 80th anniversary this week as the 2016 Olympics begin in Rio de Janeiro.

Through their testimonies on the Visual History Archive and The 1939 Society websites, Holocaust survivors and rescuers have inspired middle and high school students from across the nation and eight countries outside of the United States to become “Messengers of Memory,” the theme of this year’s Annual Holocaust Art and Writing Contest sponsored by Chapman University and The 1939 Society.

Lemkin is the subject of a new documentary called "Watchers of the Sky," now playing in select theaters. It is inspired by U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power’s Pulitzer-Prize winning book A Problem from Hell.

In the fascinating short documentary The Past is Present, teachers and students share their experience going to Poland to learn from testimony and commemorate the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

Junior Intern Charlotte Masters made a very personal discovery during the trip to Poland and continues to share her experiences today.

Member of Ukrainian Parliament, Viktor Pinchuk, has made a generous contribution to support the production of a new documentary film that will rely upon the testimonies in the Shoah Foundation archive recorded in Ukraine. Mr. Pinchuk, who initiated the project, is the founder of Interpipe Scientific and Industrial Production Group. The 18-month project also includes the creation of a study guide for students and teachers that will be based on the film.

The conference included a night of films, an academic symposium and a concert, all exploring music as it has been used as a form of resistance to genocides throughout history.

As the son of two survivors of the Shoah and the husband of a daughter of two survivors, identifying as the Next Generation has been the essence of who I am. It is the prism through which I see and evaluate all worldly events. It was particularly my father’s life that affected me the most. He truly was a “survivor." He survived the war running for his life through Russia, Siberian labor camps and other lands in Asia. He survived losing his parents, five of his sisters their husbands and children. He escaped from his hometown in the Russian sector to a displaced person camp in in the American sector. He survived as a refugee in Belgium and then as an immigrant in the United States. He survived the loss of his wife at a young age raising three children as a single parent in a foreign land.

Professor Peter Hayes, world-renowned scholar of the history of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, will serve as the 2019-2020 Sara and Asa Shapiro Scholar in Residence at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research.

Professor Dan Stone, a renowned historian of the Holocaust, will serve as the 2023-2024 Sara and Asa Shapiro Scholar in Residence at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research and USC Shoah Foundation. He will spend a week in residence at the Center and USC Shoah Foundation in April and deliver the Annual Sara and Asa Shapiro Lecture entitled “The Holocaust: An Unfinished History” on April 8, 2024.

The 2015 Teaching with Testimony in the 21st Century program in Hungary has finally begun after the most competitive application process in the history of the program.

A Modern Germany history course taught by Longwood University Professor Melissa Kravetz received an honorable mention for “Interesting Assignment” from the H-German online network for its IWitness-based final assignment.

There is a current controversy about the allegation that the great mufti of Jerusalem instigated the final solution of the Nazis. While there is no doubt that Haj Amin al-Husseini, was a virulent anti-Semite, history shows that the Final Solution was conceived and implemented by Nazis and nobody else.

In a five-hour interview with USC Shoah Foundation, Justus Rosenberg refers to himself as “small fry,” “a cog,” an unimportant person. And perhaps it was for this reason that for decades, the Bard College literature professor hadn’t let on—to his colleagues, to his students, and even, for a time, to his own wife—that he had fought and outwitted the Nazis during World War II to save thousands from persecution.

Rena Quint has worked hard to find a balance between moving beyond memory and living inside of it, between yearning to know—and have proof of—where she came from and what she lost, but of not wanting to be defined by it.

This collection of photos offers a rare glimpse of an outdoor Jewish ghetto in the countryside – specifically in Kutno, Poland. The images depict a form of ghetto that was actually more common, but far less known, than the urban settings (i.e. Warsaw Ghetto) that are cemented in the public imagination.

LOS ANGELES – April 26, 2017 – Scant attention has been paid to the key roles women played in the Nuremberg Trials that held Nazi perpetrators to account for their role in the Holocaust. This is the main focus of a dissertation by Diane Amann, associate dean at the University of Georgia School of Law. She will expand on her work in January 2018 when she comes as a fellow to conduct research at USC Shoah Foundation’s Center for Advanced Genocide Research at the University of Southern California.

Museum visitors can now interact with the testimonies of Holocaust survivors Sam Harris, Aaron Elster and Fritzie Fritzshall, in addition to Pinchas Gutter, three weekends a month from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.

Fifteen hours of interviews describing the actions of a group of World War II-era diplomats who defied official policies to save tens of thousands of lives during the Holocaust have been added to USC Shoah Foundation’s 55,000-strong Visual History Archive (VHA) thanks to a collaboration with the Andrew J. & Joyce D. Mandell Family Foundation.

A forgotten forced labor camp for Jews in Czech Republic has been rediscovered as a result of research conducted in the Visual History Archive by Marcel Mahdal, a graduate of USC Shoah Foundation’s Teaching with Testimony in the 21st Century program.