Today marks the 84th anniversary of the Kindertransport, the rescue operation that beginning in 1938 helped nearly 10,000 Jewish children escape to the United Kingdom from Germany and Nazi-controlled territory in Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland. 

On January 23, 2002, Ruth Pearl dreamt that her son, Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, was scared and in trouble. In her dream, she told him she would bring him tea and take care of him. She woke up in a panic and sent an email to Daniel, who was on assignment in Karachi, Pakistan. “I said, ‘Danny, this is a dream that I had. Please humor me and answer this email immediately.’ He never did,” Ruth said in an interview with the USC Shoah Foundation in 2014.

We are grateful that so many of these survivors, partners, friends, and family members have entrusted us to share their stories for future generations, and for the passion and dedication they brought in support of our mission.

What does it mean to live 70 years after the liberation of Auschwitz in a world in deep crisis? What does it mean with all we know about the damage that hatred causes – after all the pain we have gone through – that we are hurtling out of control into an inferno of rage that takes us right back to where we started?  Why are survivors of the Holocaust who walked out of the camps with at least the hope that their own suffering was not in vain, dying disappointed?

The young Nazi approached 13-year-old Szulem Czygielmamn as he walked on the sidewalk of Lubartowska Street in Lublin, Poland, and shoved him off the sidewalk. Szulem was lucky; Jews had died for less.

  “Geographies of Persecution in Occupied Paris: Place and Space in Survivors' Testimonies” Maël Le Noc (PhD Candidate in Geography, Texas State University) 2019-2020 Margee and Douglas Greenberg Research Fellow March 12, 2020  

“How the Holocaust’s Jewish Calendars Bear Witness” Alan Rosen (Recipient of the 2020 Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research) April 21, 2021

The Institute mourns the passing of members of our community in 2022, including survivors who have given testimony, Joe Adamson, Helen Fagin, Sigmund Burke, Vera Gissing, Gerda Weissmann Klein, Bill Harvey, Max Glauben, Max Eisen, Phillip Maisel, Edward Mosberg, Judah Samet and Robert Clary.

19-20 лютого 2010 року, з метою привернення уваги суспільства до небезпек, породжених людською нетерпимістю, Інститут візуальної історії та освіти фонду Шоа Університету Південної Каліфорнії провів Всеукраїнський тренінг вчителів за матеріалами навчально-методичного посібника «Голодомор в Україні 1932-1933 років. Людський вимір трагедії». Метою тренінгу було підвищити кваліфікацію вчителів-методистів історії та правознавства, ознайомити з методологічними аспектами роботи з посібником, розвинути навички роботи з відеосвідченнями з архіву візуальної історії Інституту фонду Шоа.

Joseph Greenblatt believes it was the antisemitic taunts he endured throughout his childhood in Warsaw that led him to a life of resistance. He was a key player in the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and then took on the Germans again, this time with the Polish Home Army in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 — for which he later received a medal. Greenblatt’s testimony, recorded in New York City in 1996, is contained in USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive.

Joseph Greenblatt believes it was the antisemitic taunts he endured throughout his childhood in Warsaw that led him to a life of resistance. He was a key player in the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and then took on the Germans again, this time with the Polish Home Army in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 — for which he later received a medal. Greenblatt’s testimony, recorded in New York City in 1996, is contained in USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive.

Anna Heilman and a group of young women smuggled gunpowder to blow up an Auschwitz crematorium. Some of them were caught. Their story lives on in Anna’s testimony.

Until he retired from the Soviet Red Army in 1967, Leonid Rozenberg carried the banner at the head of the semi-annual military parade in the city of Lugansk, in what is now Ukraine, with hundreds of fellow soldiers marching behind him and thousands of spectators cheering him on. Although highly decorated – his chest was covered in medals – the honor of leading the parade was tainted for Leonid. During his 26 years in the Soviet military Leonid was never promoted beyond the rank of lieutenant colonel. The reason? He was a Jew.

At one point in the horrific spring of 1994, Narcisse Gasimba had given up. Since April, Gasimba and other resistors in the mountains of western Rwanda had been using stones and spears to fend off wave after wave of Hutu attacks against Tutsis on the Bisesero hillside, but by the end of June their efforts felt fruitless. Tens of thousands, including members of Gasimba’s own family, had been massacred by Hutu attackers.

USC Shoah Foundation mourns the passing of Marta (Weiss) Wise, who was ten years old when she was liberated from Auschwitz, having endured the medical torture of Josef Mengele, along with her sister, Eva (Weiss) Slonim. She was 88. Marta and Eva were among a group of children pictured in a photograph—a still from a film shot by a Soviet cameraman soon after the liberation of Auschwitz—that became an iconic image of the horrors of the death camp where nearly one million Jews were killed during the Holocaust.

In writing the story of Polish Catholic diplomat Jan Karski, who in 1943 brought eye-witness evidence of Nazi atrocities directly to Western leaders, creators of the play and film "Remember This" had many sources to draw on. But it was Karski’s 1995 interview with the USC Shoah Foundation that was most useful in navigating the intricacies of Karski’s character, providing emotional resonance to the film.

We are grateful that so many of these survivors, partners, friends, and family members have entrusted us to share their stories for future generations, and for the passion and dedication they brought in support of our mission.

The USC Shoah Foundation mourns the loss of Dr. Ruth K. Westheimer, a Holocaust survivor who fled Nazi Germany without her parents at the age of 10 and went on to become a renowned and beloved sex therapist and media personality. She was 96 years old. 

In a five-hour interview with the USC Shoah Foundation, Justus Rosenberg refers to himself as a “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 wife—that he had fought and outwitted the Nazis during World War II to save thousands from persecution.

Herbert Zipper, a world-renowned conductor, composer and pioneer of the community arts movement in the United States, grew up in a Vienna of extremes: From his birth in 1904 until he fled in 1939, the Austrian capital transformed from the heights of science and culture to the depths of economic depression and the onslaught of violent antisemitism and Nazi rule.

Brandeis University Professor Dawn Skorczewski examines the differences between the testimonies of two sonderkommando survivors, Dario Gabbai and his cousin Morris Venezia.

USC Shoah Foundation Institute hosts panel discussion.

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.

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.

Alexovics Ingrid írása a vizuális archívumok oktatási célú felhasználásának lehetőségeiről

Le sauvetage est un sujet fondamental pour comprendre la survie au cours du génocide et mesurer la difficulté des choix effectués par les individus dans des circonstances extrêmes. Bien que de nombreuses histoires de survie pendant l’Holocauste soient dues à des circonstances inexpliquées ou inexplicables, il y a aussi des traces multiples d’aides individuelle ou collective et de sauvetage qui permirent à des milliers de Juifs de survivre.

Included within the course’s syllabus is the testimony of Holocaust survivor Eva Slonim, who was depicted in an iconic photo of a group of children standing behind the barbed wire at Auschwitz. Slonim composed a poem along with a group of other children while imprisoned in Auschwitz.