French film director Claude Lanzmann spoke candidly about his latest film, The Last of the Unjust, at a USC School of Cinematic Arts screening hosted by USC Shoah Foundation Tuesday night.
screening, claude lanzmann, Stephen Smith / Tuesday, December 10, 2013
Seventy-five years ago this week, Nazi Germany entered Austria. With most Austrians in support of the move, the country was incorporated into Germany on March 13, 1938.
anschluss, kristallnacht, die Vermächtnis, The Legacy / Monday, March 11, 2013
Jewish Holocaust SurvivorInterview language: ItalianPiero Terracina recalls January 1945 in Auschwitz II-Birkenau, where he witnessed SS guards leaving the camp. Upon their return, he was forced to participate in a death march where he managed to escape his wardens and seek refuge in Auschwitz I. On January 27, 1945, he recalls the first arrival of the Soviet armed forces in the camp and describes the first inmates' reaction to the liberators.
clip, subtitled, auschwitz, liberation, male, jewish survivor / Friday, May 24, 2013
USC Shoah Foundation’s associate director of research, Dan Leshem, participated in Cardozo School of Law’s Law and Film course taught by documentary filmmaker/historian Christian Delage on Sept. 29.
/ Tuesday, October 8, 2013
USC Shoah Foundation - The Institute for Visual History and Education is pleased to announce its Fellows for 2013/2014 academic year.
fellows, academics, scalar, research / Friday, May 31, 2013
Seventy-seven years ago today, the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games commenced in Germany. Memories of the XI Olympiad loom large in many Holocaust survivors’ minds: 171 testimonies in USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education’s Visual History Archive (VHA) mention the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games.
olympics, sports, jesse owens, diane jacobs, endre altman, frances jones, hitler, Berlin / Thursday, August 1, 2013
Scholars from around the world will gather Friday and Saturday to discuss genocide resistance in the past and present at the third annual “Resisting the Path to Genocide” workshop. The workshop is free and open to the public.
genocide resistance, usc dornsife, wolf gruner, Stephen Smith / Tuesday, September 24, 2013
On the heels of USC Shoah Foundation’s new partnership with the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall to collect and preserve testimony of Nanjing Massacre survivors, the educational platform Facing History and Ourselves signed an agreement to integrate three of those testimonies into its own educational materials.
nanjing, nanjing survivor, education, teacher, teaching, testimony / Wednesday, December 18, 2013
As president of the Koret Foundation and chairman of Taube Philanthropies, Tad Taube has contributed millions to philanthropic causes around the world. But he says his dedication to USC Shoah Foundation is simply “a natural thing to do.” Taube and his parents fled Poland in 1939 and ultimately settled in Los Angeles. After getting his master’s in industrial engineering from Stanford, Taube was one of the creators of E-H Research Laboratories and began a career in real estate.
/ Thursday, October 10, 2013
Ian Zdanowicz is making the most out of his month at USC Shoah Foundation. Zdanowicz is the recipient of the Visiting PhD Fellowship from the USC Dornsife 2020 Genocide Resistance Research Cluster, which is led by USC Shoah Foundation executive director Stephen Smith and Wolf Gruener, Shapell-Guerin Chair in Jewish Studies and Professor of History.
/ Monday, November 4, 2013
Jewish Holocaust SurvivorInterview language: PortugueseIn 1944, Augusta Glaz was interrogated for 5 days by the Gestapo in Brussels, Belgium, where she was brutally treated. She was then taken to the Mechelen Concentration Camp, also known as Malines, where she was placed in an underground bunker built especially for female political prisoners. There, she remained for 30 days.
clip, subtitled, female, partisan, jewish survivor, résistance, mechelen / Friday, May 24, 2013
After signing the Munich Agreement in September 1938 and under the pretext of protecting the interests of ethnic Germans who agitated for Nazi rule, Hitler annexed the Czechoslovakian borderlands. While some still hoped that giving up Czechoslovak territory would bring peace, the agreement signed by Great Britain, Germany, Italy, and France meant the beginning of occupation for the citizens of Czechoslovakia.
czech, student film, holocaust, yad vashem / Wednesday, March 20, 2013
Deborah Batiste has worked for the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) since 1991, after teaching high school English for 16 years, and was one of the lead authors of Echoes and Reflections, the multimedia Holocaust education guide developed by Yad Vashem, USC Shoah Foundation and ADL. She is currently the Echoes and Reflections project director, facilitating or co-facilitating over 130 Echoes and Reflections training programs in 34 states and the District of Columbia since 2005, reaching 25 percent of all participants who have attended Echoes and Reflections programs. 
/ Friday, September 13, 2013
USC Shoah Foundation is saddened to learn of the untimely passing of Dmytro Groisman, Ukranian human rights activist and USC Shoah Foundation interviewer. Groisman died Monday of a heart attack after a long illness, according to his colleague Maksym Butkevych. He was 41.
Dmytro Groisman, interviewer / Thursday, August 8, 2013
Jennifer Goss designed the new IWitness Information Quest activity about Kristallnacht to teach students about the complexities of one of the most important turning points of the Holocaust.
/ Thursday, October 31, 2013
A three-day seminar will be held November 22-24 in Kyiv to train Ukrainian teachers of social sciences and humanities, university tutors of law and human rights activists on the use of a new multimedia teacher’s guide titled Where do Human Rights Begin: History and Contemporary Approaches.
Ukraine, teacher training, curriculum, visual history archive / Wednesday, November 20, 2013
By the time they’re 88 years old, most people start thinking about slowing down. But not Claude Lanzmann. The French journalist and documentarian is about to release his seventh film, The Last of the Unjust – a three hour and 40 minute examination of Rabbi Benjamin Murmelstein, the last president of the Jewish Council of the Theresienstadt ghetto in Czechoslovakia.
/ Monday, November 25, 2013
Yehuda Bauer and Xu Xin have each led vastly different lives. But they both ended up as two of the world’s most respected and influential Holocaust scholars. For Bauer, the journey began in Czechoslovakia, where he was born in 1926. He and his family immigrated to Israel in 1939, just before World War II, and he graduated from Cardiff University in Wales after fighting in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. He received his PhD in 1960 at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and began teaching at its Institute for Contemporary Jewry the following year.
/ Wednesday, November 6, 2013
We continue our 10-part Echoes and Reflections series with Lesson 7: Rescuers and Non-Jewish Resistance.
echoes and reflections, holocaust, rescuer, education, teaching / Friday, October 25, 2013
Sid Shachnow has two Silver Stars, three Bronze Stars and two Purple Hearts -- and that's just for his service in Vietnam, where he led his troops with courage and distinction. “There was no room for conscience,” he confides when discussing his 39 years of military service. “Once I was face to face with a Viet Cong. I had him in my sights as he ran toward me. He dropped his weapon and veered left. I did not pull the trigger. I still do not know if I did the right thing. My conscience got in the way.”
blog, Stephen Smith, Sid Shachnow, op-eds / Thursday, December 5, 2013
Shortly after I saw Schindler’s List for the first time, I had an argument with my father about the value of such Hollywood blockbusters for teaching people about the Holocaust. We debated the following question: If Schindler’s List was the only source of information for people about the Holocaust would it perhaps be better if they did not see it at all? That is, is Schindler’s List better than nothing if what it shows is all you know about what happened to nearly six million Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe? My dad said (or shouted) yes, but I was unconvinced.
#TTIC14, conference, Schindler's List, op-eds / Sunday, December 1, 2013
Jakub Mlynar works with USC Shoah Foundation across the world from the majority of its staff, but his enthusiasm can be felt all the way from the Czech Republic. Mlynar is the coordinator of the Malach Center for Visual History, a Visual History Archive access site located at Charles University in Prague. He is also its 2013 teaching fellow, preparing to teach a sociology course using the Visual History Archive next winter.
/ Wednesday, December 4, 2013
The 10-part Echoes and Reflections series continues with Lesson 8: Survivors and Liberators.
echoes and reflections, survivor, liberator, education, teaching, testimony / Friday, November 1, 2013
This exhibit features a series of interviews with witnesses of the pogrom that occurred on November 9-10, 1938, known as Kristallnacht, "Night of Broken Glass." Organized in partnership with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
discrimination, kristallnacht / Monday, April 29, 2013
Andrea Szőnyi tells the story of her father, who survived Auschwitz as a boy with the help of a man named Ernő Spiegel.
pastforward, Andrea Szőnyi / Monday, October 28, 2013

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