If you’ve ever liked a Facebook post or replied to a tweet from the USC Shoah Foundation, you’ve met Deanna Pitre – at least virtually.

(From left: Steven Katz, Abraham Zuckerman, Wayne Zuckerman)Abraham Zuckerman spent most of his life bringing honor and attention to Oskar Schindler, who saved his life during the Holocaust. Now, his children have honored Zuckerman himself by helping to bring to life the new book Testimony: The Legacy of Schindler’s List and the USC Shoah Foundation.

I first learned about Helena Horowitz’s life history when I found her testimony as I searched through the archive in IWitness the Institute’s educational website featuring the testimonies of survivors and other witnesses to the Holocaust and other genocides.

The stories of musicians during the Holocaust guided Syuzanna Petrosyan and Greg Irwin through the Student Voices Short Film Contest, and the result is their winning film Play for Your Life.Petrosyan, a master’s candidate in public diplomacy, and Irwin, a senior international relations major, are both interns at the USC Shoah Foundation and members of its student organization, SFISA.

Twenty years ago, David Strick photographed Steven Spielberg surrounded by 12 Holocaust survivors – illustrating in a single frame the work and mission of the newly-founded Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation.On a cool day this January, Spielberg again posed for a photo by Strick; only this time, students from middle school to college stood around him. This is the Shoah Foundation today.

USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education is pleased to announce that Ecole Normale Superieure (ENS), a university in Lyon, France, is the 51st institution, and the first in France, to gain full access to the Institute’s Visual History Archive, a repository of nearly 52,000 video testimonies from survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust and other genocides.

Jared McBride, the fellowship’s debut recipient, was selected by a panel of USC researchers and professors for the originality of his proposal and its potential to advance genocide research.

Jared McBride, the fellowship’s debut recipient, was chosen by a panel of USC researchers and professors for the originality of his proposal and its potential to advance genocide research.

One hundred survivors from nations around the world to participate in official observance on January 27, 2015

Marianna Bergida grew up with little knowledge of most of her family – her mother, sister, cousins, grandparents, aunts and uncles were killed in Auschwitz when she was very young, and her father couldn’t speak about his own experiences during the Holocaust. Determined to not let other descendants of survivors lose their family history as she had, Bergida became an interviewer for the Shoah Foundation and ended up interviewing one of the real-life inspirations of Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List.

Howard Cwick was born in the Bronx, New York, on August 25, 1923, to Samuel and Sarah Cwick, both Polish immigrants. Howard had an older sister, Sylvia. TheCwick family spoke both English and Yiddish, kept a kosher home, and attended synagogue three times a week. Howard went to school at P.S. 100 in the Bronx beforegoing on to Brooklyn Technical High School. When he was seven years old, Howard received his first camera and became interested in photography.

In time for February’s Olympic Games and Black History Month, two new activities have been published to IWitness, each dealing with racism in different contexts.

On July 16 -17, 1942, over 13,000 Jews from Paris and its suburbs were rounded up by French police in the early morning hours and forcefully taken from their homes to both the Vélodrome d’Hiver, a winter cycling stadium in Paris, and to the Drancy internment camp.

The fellowship provides summer support for one member of the University of Pennsylvania faculty to integrate the Institute’s testimonies into a new or modified existing course.

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.

In January 2014, four scholars from the “Holocaust Geographies Collaborative”—an international, interdisciplinary group of researchers evaluated the link between personal testimony, the index of the archive and geography.

Howard Cwick est né dans le Bronx, à New York (USA), le 25 août 1923, de Samuel et Sarah Cwick, tous deux immigrants polonais. Howard a une soeur aînée, Sylvia. La famille Cwick parle à la fois anglais et yiddish, garde leur maison casher, et se rend à la synagogue trois fois par semaine. Howard va à l’école à P.S. 100 dans le Bronx avant d’entrer au lycée technique de Brooklyn. À l’âge de 7 ans, Howard reçoit sa première caméra et se passionne de photographie.

A group of men is placed in several trucks. They are driven through the streets and out of town into an open area surrounded by trees. They are beaten around the head with rifle butts, made to run in a group towards an open mass grave. A mere handful of armed guards make them lie in the grave like sardines. Then they are shot one by one in broad daylight. The horrific spectacle, highly reminiscent of the Nazi Einsatzgruppen Aktions in the Soviet Union in 1941, was, in fact, the mass murder of some 30 men that took place in Iraq just this week. 

Heather Dune Macadam is fighting to bring the story of 999 girls to life.Macadam is currently fundraising to make a documentary film called First Transport to Auschwitz: The Story of 999 Girls. The deadline for her Kickstarter campaign is Mon., March 31; click here to make a donation.

Despite the current political turmoil in their country, six teachers from Crimea traveled to Kyiv last month for a seminar on oral history and USC Shoah Foundation’s Where Do Human Rights Begin teacher’s guide, led by Ukraine international consultant Anna Lenchovska.

There is talk of a “new anti-Semitism” sweeping the globe, but all I see is the same irrational hatred aimed at the same perplexed victims, who are once again left wondering what has energized such bile.

Over the last six weeks, I have had the unique opportunity to be the Senior Fellow at USC Shoah Foundation - The Institute for Visual History and Education. It’s been an honor for me to be here, especially since I led the Institute between 2000 and 2008. Returning to this remarkable place, having the opportunity to use the Visual History Archive, and working among dear former colleagues and new friends has been simply thrilling.

When students learn about the Holocaust for the first time by watching testimony from the USC Shoah Foundation, Inna Gogina knows exactly how they feel. She, too, didn’t know about the Holocaust – until she began working for the USC Shoah Foundation.

With nearly 52,000 interviews from survivors of the Holocaust and other genocides, the archive of audio-visual testimony assembled and maintained by USC Shoah Foundation is so abundant it would take at least 12 years to watch it from beginning to end. And that’s assuming the footage would be rolling 24 hours a day, seven days a week. When I started my new job here at the Institute, I was struck by this statistic, which adequately conveys the scope of this incredible resource.

When I was a child, my grandfather often told me about the Second World War. While he sat next to me, coloring or teaching me letters of the alphabet, he would sneak in a story about his days in the Soviet army. He would tell me about his post as a commander of a marine unit and how his forces liberated an Austrian town under Nazi occupation.

Within the Visual History Archive there are over 8,000 testimonies that reference France, over 1,600 that were conducted in the country and over 1,800 testimonies that were given in French.

With the publication of her book Une vie contre une autre (One Life Against Another) historian Sonia Combe has become one of the first French scholars to extensively use the Visual History Archive in academic research – and she hopes many other researchers will follow in her footsteps.

Steve Kay, dean of the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, believe that the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive holds many keys to unlocking the enigmatic conditions that have led to genocides throughout history.

USC Shoah Foundation is partnering with Discovery Education, the leading provider of digital content and professional development for K-12 classrooms, on education components of Auschwitz: The Past is Present.

Esther Toporek Finder discusses how second and third generation survivors embrace the message of education and remembrance in this article from PastForward Spring 2014.