An online lecture by Wolf Gruner, Founding Director of the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research, organized by The Wiener Holocaust Library
cagr / Monday, January 11, 2021
The USC Casden Institute presents a Casden Conversation featuring Dr. Wolf Gruner in conversation with Dr. Steve Ross
cagr / Monday, January 11, 2021
An online lecture by Wolf Gruner (Founding Director, USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research) Organized by the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre and The Base Cosponsored by the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research
cagr / Friday, February 5, 2021
On the day that Faye Schulman’s parents and siblings were killed, along with almost all the Jews of her Eastern Polish town of Lenin, Schulman (then Faigel Lazebnik) was pulled aside by a Nazi officer. The Nazi official had been to Schulman’s studio a few weeks previously. After invading the town in 1942, the Nazis had ordered the talented young photographer to take photographs—both to document their activities in the town and to provide their officers with vanity portraits. Schulman remembered the photo session with the Nazi who now pulled her aside.
/ Friday, June 4, 2021
Today, on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, a complex of concentration and extermination camps, we take the time to honor the millions of victims of the Holocaust by listening to those who survived these atrocities, and using their remarkable testimonies of survival and loss to cultivate empathy and respect in future generations so that these atrocities may never happen again. “History shows that the only way to stop genocide is to sound the alarm before it is too late.” 
/ Wednesday, January 27, 2021
Join author Judy Batalion, in conversation with Nancy Spielberg, to learn more about Batalion's new book The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos.
/ Wednesday, May 19, 2021
Mirla G. Raz is a past president of the Phoenix Holocaust Survivors’ Association. She is a member of the Board and the Education Chair for the Phoenix Holocaust Association. Ms. Raz’ newest publication is The Birds Sang Eulogies: A Memoir. The book recounts the harrowing experiences of her parents during WWII as they struggled to survive the Nazi’s attempted extermination of the Jews.
/ Wednesday, February 24, 2021
In October 1942, when deportations from the Warsaw ghetto paused, more than 20 youth groups and underground units coalesced into a united front. Vladka Meed channeled her despair at losing her family into fighting the Nazis.
/ Friday, June 11, 2021
Join Dr. Ruth Westheimer in conversation with Rabbi Peter J. Rubinstein after a screening of her animated short film "Ruth: A Little Girl's Big Journey," told in her own voice as she recounts how she survived the Holocaust as a young girl.
/ Wednesday, September 29, 2021
Betty Grebenschikoff and Ana María Wahrenberg were inseparable best friends before the Holocaust. Separated when their families each fled the Nazis, they each believed the other had perished. They were reunited just a few short months ago thanks to a combination of international partnerships, astute research, and the power of survivor testimony.
GAM / Friday, April 9, 2021
Another year dominated by the ongoing pandemic draws to a close. From producing animated films to conducting interviews, forging new partnerships and sharing incredible testimonies, 2021 was a year to remember. Here are some of the highlights of the work the Institute has accomplished.
/ Thursday, December 16, 2021
USC Shoah Foundation and the Maimonides Institute for Medicine, Ethics and the Holocaust are partnering to develop new and innovative educational programing on medical ethics and the Holocaust. The Holocaust marked a profound and sadistic deviation from traditional notions of medical ethics, with medical and scientific communities in the Third Reich actively participating in the labeling, persecution and eventual mass murder of millions deemed “unfit.”
/ Friday, July 30, 2021
Two museums have opened installations of Dimensions in Testimony, USC Shoah Foundation's interactive biography series.  In New Orleans, visitors to the National World War II Museum can interact with Staff Sergeant Alan Moskin, the first WWII Liberator filmed for Dimensions in Testimony. Moskin was a member of the 66th Infantry Regiment, 71st Infantry Division, that liberated Gunskirchen concentration camp in Austria. The exhibition runs through July 25, 2021.
DiT / Friday, February 5, 2021
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
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
Hela Goldstein’s testimony given to the British Film and Photographic Unit on April 24, 1945 is believed to be the first-ever audio-visual testimony given by a Holocaust survivor. As a 22-year old victim, she spoke from Bergen-Belsen, the Nazi concentration camp where she was imprisoned upon liberation. Standing at the foot of a mass grave with her killers before her, Hela recounted what she experienced. By telling her story in the face of death, she became a foremother of testimony.
/ Friday, May 14, 2021
Yad Vashem has collected approximately 4.8 million pages of testimony that restore the personal identities and record the brief life stories of the six million Jews who perished at the hands of the Nazis. In honor of Yom HaShoah—Israel’s Day of Holocaust Remembrance—this webinar, led by a Yad Vashem educator, will highlight survivor testimony from Echoes & Reflections, and pages of testimony from Yad Vashem’s archive, to examine the importance of memory and how it serves us and future generations, to create a better world. This webinar is open to teachers and their students.
GAM / Wednesday, March 31, 2021
The young boy was walking down the street in Łodz, Poland, when he spotted the treasure. He could not believe his luck! He picked up the belt admiring its beautiful etchings and the decorative metal buckle. With his chest out, he proudly continued walking down the street with his new treasure rolled up and safe in his pocket. Now he would be able to wear long pants instead of the short pants and suspenders young boys wore. His new belt would rocket him from boyhood to manhood status! What a monumental find!
op-eds / Wednesday, February 24, 2021
A distinguished voice of history has been lost today in the passing of Auschwitz survivor Roman Kent, who captured the agony of the Holocaust and the power of love in his telling of a simple story about his childhood dog, Lala. Kent was 92.
in memoriam / Friday, May 21, 2021
On November 7th 1996, Nancy Fisher, a bundle of nerves, knocked on the door of Erika Gold’s home in Leonia, New Jersey. She was there on behalf of the Shoah Foundation to interview Erika, a Holocaust survivor. Nancy was terrified to conduct the interview. Knowing only the Nancy Fisher of today, I am shocked to hear this. Nancy exudes a calm wisdom, care, and confidence that only 25 years of Holocaust survivor interviewing could foster.
/ Thursday, November 11, 2021
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.
/ Tuesday, October 5, 2021
“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
cagr / Monday, May 31, 2021
​We Share the Same Sky weaves together the stories of these two young women--Hana as a refugee who remains one step ahead of the Nazis at every turn, and Rachael, whose insatiable curiosity to touch the past guides her into the lives of countless strangers, bringing her love and tragic loss. Throughout the course of her twenties, Hana's history becomes a guidebook for Rachael in how to live a life empowered by grief.
/ Monday, August 9, 2021
The documentary Two Sides of Survival just landed Winner of Best Documentary Short at the Angeles Film Festival. Produced by USC Shoah Foundation, Two Sides of Survival brings together stories from the East and West, chronicling how Jews who fled the Nazis in Europe, and Chinese who were threatened by Japanese occupation, improbably found refuge close to one another in the 1930’s and during World War II.
film, documentary, nanjing, holocaust / Wednesday, September 1, 2021
In his testimonial archived with the USC Shoah Foundation, George Weiss spoke to the dread and exile he endured as a child during Nazi Party rule. This chronicle is about the man who sculptured all he lived, imagined and embodied.
cagr / Tuesday, February 9, 2021
November 9 and 10 marks the anniversary of the 1938 Kristallnacht (“The Night of Broken Glass”) pogrom, the first major public and government-sanctioned display of antisemitic violence against Jews in Germany. Orchestrated by the Nazis in retaliation for the assassination of a German embassy official in Paris by a seventeen-year-old Jewish youth named Herschel Grynzspan, 1,400 synagogues and 7,000 businesses were destroyed, almost 100 Jews were killed, and 30,000 were arrested and sent to concentration camps.
/ Friday, October 29, 2021
USC Shoah Foundation this week will launch a Teaching with Testimony Webinar for K-5 educators featuring the exclusive global premiere of Ruth: A Little Girl’s Big Journey, an animated short film that brings to life the remarkable childhood journey of media personality, author and Holocaust survivor Dr. Ruth K. Westheimer, known the world over as Dr. Ruth.  
/ Tuesday, January 26, 2021
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.
/ Wednesday, June 9, 2021
“Challenging the Shame Paradigm: Jewish Women’s Narratives of Sexual(ized) Violence During the Holocaust” Lauren Cantillon (PhD candidate in the Department of Culture, Media & Creative Industries at King’s College London, UK) 2020-2021 Robert J. Katz Research Fellow in Genocide Studies March 25, 2021
cagr / Friday, April 9, 2021

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