The Canadian collections consist of 1,250 testimonies taken by nine organizations in Canada, the three biggest of which are the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre, Sarah and Chaim Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre, and McGill University.
canada, visual history archive / Thursday, September 29, 2016
We mourn the passing of Dana Schwartz, 89, a Holocaust survivor and dedicated interviewer for the USC Shoah Foundation, who died on May 9 in Los Angeles. Dana, who later became a teacher and marriage and family therapist, was four when the Second World War started. She and her mother escaped the Lwów ghetto and survived in hiding.
30th anniversary, tribute, collections / Wednesday, July 3, 2024
"New Perspectives on Kristallnacht: After 80 Years, the Nazi Pogrom in Global Comparison" 
cagr / Wednesday, May 30, 2018
USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research staff are in Australia this month for several presentations and a workshop centered on the Visual History Archive and testimony-based research.
cagr, australia / Wednesday, July 5, 2017
Jerome Nemer Lecture & Film Documentary Flyer.pdf
cagr / Tuesday, October 27, 2015
Jewish Holocaust SurvivorInterview language: HungarianÉva explains how she survived a roundup of Jews by Hungary’s Arrow Cross party members in Budapest in winter 1944. A young Hungarian Nazi came to take Eva, but spared her at the last minute due to Eva's father's quick thinking. Years after the war, she encountered the man again, this time as a high-ranking political police officer in then-Communist Hungary.
clip, subtitled, female, jewish survivor, arrow cross, sports / Friday, May 24, 2013
The award-winning French documentarian Claude Lanzmann will present his latest film and participate in a discussion with USC Shoah Foundation executive director Stephen Smith at the USC School of Cinematic Arts Tues., Dec. 10.
claude lanzmann, documentary, screening, usc, Stephen Smith / Monday, November 25, 2013
This downloadable video contains clips from testimonies of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust from the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive who were born and grew up in the Polish city of Oświęcim, now infamous as the location of Auschwitz camp system created there by the occupying Nazi German administration.
auschwitz, clip reel, prewar / Thursday, January 23, 2014
Join the Montreal Holocaust Museum, USC Shoah Foundation, and Paragraphe Bookstore for a special event with author Rachael Cerrotti about her latest book “We Share the Same Sky” based on her award-winning podcast.
/ Monday, November 29, 2021
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) has constructed a new IWitness activity in conjunction with the museum’s Some Were Neighbors exhibit.
/ Tuesday, September 8, 2015
The app by USC Shoah Foundation guides visitors as they move through the plaza, providing explanations about each interpretive element, as well as personal stories by survivors, maps, photos and other multimedia.
iwalk, Philadelphia, Holocaust Memorial Plaza, plaza / Monday, October 22, 2018
Danish historian Therkel Straede spent three days at USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research this week watching testimonies in an attempt to understand the truth about one of the most gruesome and taboo aspects of the Holocaust: cannibalism in the Nazi concentration camps.
/ Friday, November 11, 2016
USC Shoah Foundation mourns the passing of Fritzie Fritzshall, president of the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center, whose story of survival and will to share it has inspired thousands of people. She was 91. Always hopeful and optimistic, Fritzie’s understanding of where hate and intolerance can lead if left unchecked has driven her her whole life to educate and empower everyone she meets. She will be dearly missed.
in memoriam / Monday, June 21, 2021
A pioneering moment for Holocaust education, the world’s first virtual reality film to take audiences through a concentration camp, launches as immersive experience at four museums in New York, California, Illinois and Florida for limited-engagement exhibit.
the last goodbye, museums / Wednesday, September 5, 2018
A new exhibit on the USC Shoah Foundation website takes a closer look at the stories of refugees during World War II. It is inspired by the current refugee crisis in Europe.
online exhibit, exhibit, Czech Republic, Martin Smok, jewish refugees, refugee, Refugee Crisis / Tuesday, September 22, 2015
English Translation: “If I made the decision to speak is because I think -- not just for me since it is very difficult [to speak] and I thought about it but not for long-- because I believe that like me, all those who went through the Holocaust should not remain silent. We must speak for the sake of future generations and to prevent this from happening again. And we are not so far from it because, lately, skinheads [Neo-Nazis] are lifting their heads. It is also being said that what we are telling is happening only in the movies, such as in Schindler's List.
jewish surivor, male, subtitled / Tuesday, November 8, 2016
During a well-known case involving German industrialists who reaped enormous profits providing armaments to the Nazi regime with the help of slave labor at concentration camps, the defendants faced Cecelia Goetz -- the only woman ever to deliver an opening statement at the Nuremberg Trials.
Women at Nuremberg, Nuremberg Trials, Cecelia Goetz / Friday, May 18, 2018
Renowned Holocaust scholar and former USC Shoah Foundation Yom HaShoah Scholar Professor Yehuda Bauer has given his testimony to USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive.
testimony, yehuda bauer, karen jungblut, Israel / Tuesday, July 21, 2015
Ralph Leeser and his family fled to the United States from Nazi Germany in 1939. A few years later he joined the United States armed forces and helped liberate Buchenwald concentration camp. After the liberation Leeser and his fellow soldiers went to Braunau, Austria and entered Hitler's home.
clip, male, liberator, jewish survivor, Ralph Leeser, Braunau / Monday, June 9, 2014
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.
/ Tuesday, May 10, 2011
New University of Southern California graduate Bijou Nguyen focused on the testimonies of one of the least well-known groups persecuted during the Holocaust for her USC Libraries Award second-place research paper The Paradoxical Treatment of Male Homosexual Prisoners During the Holocaust.
/ Friday, June 13, 2014
Holocaust survivor Zenon Neumark and Guatemalan Genocide survivor Aracely Garrido shared their stories of survival and their messages for the next generation at a Genocide Awarenes Month event hosted by DEFY, USC Shoah Foundation’s student organization.
cagr, defy, aracely garrido / Tuesday, May 9, 2017
Our 10-part Echoes and Reflections series continues with Lesson 6: Jewish Resistance.
echoes and reflections, genocide resistance, education, testimony, visual history archive / Friday, October 18, 2013
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.
/ Sunday, January 26, 2014
The event hosted by USC Shoah Foundation’s Center for Advanced Genocide Research appears to have been the only international academic conference to mark the 80th anniversary of this fateful event of November 1938, during which Nazis and ordinary Germans murdered more than 100 Jews and destroyed thousands of synagogues, Jewish institutions, stores and homes across Germany.
kristallnacht, academic conference, wolf gruner / Friday, November 30, 2018
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).”
cagr / Wednesday, July 6, 2022
Moving and powerful book about one of the world’s most profound tragedies.
/ Thursday, June 14, 2007
Senior Institute Fellow Doug Greenberg’s lecture brought to life the story of the people of Wolyn, who were slaughtered years before the most recognizable events of the Holocaust even began, yet have largely disappeared from public and scholarly memory.
Doug Greenberg, wolyn, lecture / Wednesday, March 26, 2014
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.
male, jewish survivor, clip, Shanghai, unesco, leaving home / Thursday, January 23, 2014
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.
/ Friday, September 25, 2020

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