In this lecture, Professor Peter Hayes details how and why the Nazi regime managed to kill an unprecedented number of people with ferocious speed, yet without applying significant quantities of German personnel or resources.

Art and the Holocaust will present a sampling of artwork and propaganda done during World War II in the U.S. and Nazi Germany, and work done by a child survivor of the Holocaust after the war. Moderated by Stephen D.

USC Shoah Foundation is saddened to learn of the recent passing of Sol Gringlas, who survived both the Nordhausen and Auschwitz concentration camps. Sol passed away in May of 2020. He was 100.

USC Shoah foundation is saddened to learn of the recent passing of Anneliese Nossbaum, who survived a Jewish ghetto and three concentration camps. Anneliese passed away March 23, 2020 after falling ill within weeks of returning from a trip that commemorated the 75-year anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. She was 91. She was born on January 8, 1929 in Guben, Germany as Anneliese Winterberg.  At the age of two, her family moved to Bonn where her father later became the rabbi of their synagogue.  

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.

Today we mourn the loss of Hanna Pankowsky, a remarkable woman who gave us her testimony and was one of the subjects in a portrait series of Holocaust survivors painted by David Kassan.

  “Makeshift Murder: The Holocaust at Its Peak” Peter Hayes (Northwestern University) 2019-2020 Shapiro Scholar in Residence March 5, 2020

Organized by the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research

USC Shoah Foundation is saddened to hear of the recent passing of Millie Zuckerman, Holocaust survivor and longtime friend of the Institute. Millie was surrounded by her family when she passed away on August 9, 2020 at the age of 94. She was born on September 25, 1925 in Humniska, Poland and was a hidden child of the Holocaust.

“This effort is especially important now when the world is experiencing a rise of violent antisemitism,” says Ilia Salita, CEO of Genesis Philanthropy Group. “We believe that Dimensions in Testimony will help counteract this and, more broadly, to disseminate knowledge about the tragedy of Soviet Jewry during the Shoah and the heroism of Jews who fought against the Nazis.”

In this lecture, Professor Peter Hayes detailed how and why the Nazi regime managed to kill an unprecedented number of people with ferocious speed, yet without applying significant quantities of German personnel or resources.

The child of Holocaust survivors, George Schaeffer has supported USC Shoah Foundation’s mission since he first heard about it. His parents met after the Soviets liberated Ravensbrück, the Nazis’ largest concentration camp for women. His father had been sent there as a laborer. The couple married in 1945, the same year they were freed.

In this lecture, Gabór Tóth discussed the ways text and data mining technology has helped to recover fragments of lost experiences of Nazi persecution out of oral history interviews with survivors. He also demonstrated how a data-driven anthology of these fragments has been built.

USC Shoah Foundation and Delirio Films in association with Neko Productions have completed an animated short film that brings to life the remarkable childhood journey of Holocaust survivor Dr. Ruth K. Westheimer escaping Nazi Germany, as she faced the choices that made her who she is today.


Wendy Smith Meyer first learned about the USC Shoah Foundation in 1996, when her parents, Alfred and Selma Benjamin, gave their testimony. She attended part of the interview, when her parents, who grew up in Nazi Germany, gave their first-person accounts of increasing Jewish persecution. Her uncles, Owen and Edgar Hirsch, and aunt Elise Le Hu also gave testimony.

Trudy Elbaum Gottesman keeps her family tree in her purse, close to her at all times, so she will always remember the names of relatives who were murdered in the Holocaust.

An award-winning feature film based on a true story of survival, produced in association with USC Shoah Foundation. My Name Is Sara shares the story of Sara Góralnik who at age 13 survived the Holocaust by passing as a Christian after her family was killed by Nazis. Now streaming. For more information on how to view the film, visit the official My Name Is Sara website.

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.

In 1964, America’s first Holocaust memorial was unveiled in central Philadelphia at the head of Benjamin Franklin Parkway. More than 50 years later, the location surrounding this historically significant monument houses an interactive plaza, the Philadelphia Holocaust Memorial Plaza, a living monument to the 6 million lives lost in the Holocaust. The new plaza opened in October 2018 with onsite installations to inspire visitors to remember and reflect.

To honor his parents — now age 93 and 85 — Shapiro endowed the Sara and Asa Shapiro Annual Holocaust Testimony Scholar and Lecture Fund. The program it supports enables scholars to spend up to a month in residence at USC Shoah Foundation’s Center for Advanced Genocide Research. Each fellowship culminates in a public lecture.

Pictured: Holocaust survivor Elly Gotz who gave his testimony to the Azrieli Foundation in 2018. His interview is one of 31 new testimonies from the Azrieli Foundation that have been indexed and catalogued in the Visual History Archive. This week’s semi-annual VHA release adds 128 new testimonies to the 55,000-strong collection. All the updated testimonies are available at 163 access sites worldwide.

In 1933, when Ilse-Lore Delman was six years old, she was kicked out of her school in Frankfurt, Germany, for being Jewish. Intuiting the threat of the growing Nazi movement within the country, her family fled for Holland in a furtive dash, leaving behind all their possessions. After a few years of peace in Tilburg, Ilse and her parents were forced into hiding after the Nazi invasion of Holland.

The story of Sara and Asa Shapiro is one of shared tragedy and shared success. Both were born in the small pre-war, predominantly Jewish town of Korets, in what was then Poland and is now Ukraine, into large Jewish families. Both survived the Holocaust. Sara escaped the ghetto and pretended to be a Ukrainian orphan while working as a maid. Asa was in a Russian Labor Camp in Siberia and then was subscripted into the Russian Army. They married, moved to America with practically nothing, settled in Detroit, and built a large family and a thriving business.

Rautenberg's longtime accountant, Tom Corby, now the president of the foundation that bears the Rautenberg name, remembers Erwin as a hard-working, deeply principled man. “He established the Erwin Rautenberg Foundation to strengthen Jewish causes,” Corby says. “He wanted to make sure that the Jewish people and religion endured.”

Diane Wohl and her husband, Howard, have supported USC Shoah Foundation — The Institute for Visual History and Education since before it became part of the university. They appreciate how the Institute brings people together and, as she puts it, “can slice out all the propaganda and hate with its visual testimonies.”

USC Shoah Foundation announced a new partnership with Ancestry® to provide free access to searchable data from nearly 50,000 Jewish Holocaust survivor testimonies that are in the Visual History Archive® (VHA). “We are grateful that Ancestry is providing access to this initial set of metadata and enhancing the discoverability of our archive and this critically important history,” said Stephen Smith, Finci-Viterbi Executive Director at USC Shoah Foundation. Here’s how it works:

USC Shoah Foundation today mourns the loss of a close friend, George Weiss, a longtime volunteer with the Institute and a Holocaust survivor who endured homelessness and life on the run as a young child separated from his parents in both France and Belgium during the war. He was 87. Weiss was a familiar and beloved presence at the offices of the Institute, stopping in every week to curate and work with clips of video testimony from the Visual History Archive, which contains 55,000 life stories of survivors and witnesses to the Holocaust and other genocides.

The USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research hosted professors Marianne Hirsch (Columbia University) and Leo Spitzer (Dartmouth College), who gave a lecture based on their recently published book School Photos in Liquid Time: Reframing Difference.

Only a day after the University of Southern California announced that it would conduct a three-day test to move all classes online, which soon turned into a permanent arrangement until the end of Spring semester, my colleague and I gave our last in-person introduction to the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive to a USC class. Perhaps serendipitously, one of the topics discussed in this class was physical health.

The Institute mourns the passing of members of our community in 2020, including survivors who have given testimony Hanna Pankowsky, Dario Gabbai, Anneliese Nossbaum, Éva Székely, Itka Zygmuntowicz,