The need for continued memorialization of the fate of the Roma and Sinti population of Europe has never been more important.

A group of Bioethics and the Holocaust Fellows recently gathered at USC Shoah Foundation headquarters in Los Angeles to develop content for new curriculums that will feature Visual History Archive testimony from survivors of Nazi medical experiments. 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.”

USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research welcomed the University of Munich’s Maximilian Strnad to USC last week.

Hannah Lessing represents Austrian society’s desire to atone. Her unique job involves, among other things, tracking down Austrian Holocaust survivors or their kin – inside the country and out – to offer financial reparations. Lessing, the secretary general of the National Fund of the Republic of Austria for Victims of National Socialism, came to USC Shoah Foundation this week to discuss a potential collaborative project with the Institute.

All over the world, Jewish survivors of the Holocaust era are giving testimony – but not for USC Shoah Foundation’s original collection of over 51,000 Holocaust survivor testimonies. Instead, they are the first participants of the new Testimonies of North Africa and the Middle East project.

Though USC Shoah Foundation specializes in maintaining thousands of recorded testimonies in its Visual History Archive, many of the Institute’s interviewees have also published memoirs and autobiographies.

United Nations, USC Shoah Foundation Institute, and Yad Vashem to release new educational resource.

Colin is thought to have the distinction of being the first survivor to speak on camera, just after liberation from Bergen-Belsen, which happened to be her 22nd birthday.

Instead of factories of death, these black-and-white stills convey the idea that soldiers are happy and prisoners are mere criminals serving a sentence. A research fellow with USC Shoah Foundation’s Center for Advanced Genocide Research discussed his findings on this topic in a lecture.

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.

When Elizabeth Holtzman of New York became the youngest woman in American history elected to Congress at age 31, she hadn’t spent much time thinking about Nazi war criminals. But when a whistleblower in 1973 brought to her attention the fact that such perpetrators were living in the United States with full knowledge of the federal government, she decided to use the power of her office to do something about it.

Bawnik survived a Jewish ghetto and four concentration camps, only to nearly die on one of the last days of the war, when British warplanes bombed a German ocean liner that he and thousands of other Jewish prisoners had been forced to board.

USC Shoah Foundation is saddened by the recent loss of Eva Kor, a Holocaust survivor who – along with her twin sister – endured cruel experiments conducted on her at Auschwitz, and, half a century later, sparked controversy by publicly forgiving the Nazis who tormented her and killed her parents and two older sisters. She went on to found CANDLES Museum and Education Center in Indiana.

In honor of Gay Pride Month, each Friday in June USC Shoah Foundation will publish a testimony clip about the diverse experiences of gay people during the Holocaust.

The USC Shoah Foundation mourns the August 3, 2023 passing of Nimrod “Zigi” Ariav, a Holocaust survivor who fought in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising and Israel’s War of Independence before becoming a leader in the Israeli aeronautics industry. He was a longtime supporter of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. He was 96. 

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, 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.” 

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.

Attendees tour Holocaust-related sites.

“Voices of Auschwitz” tells the stories of four survivors from the Nazi German Concentration and extermination camp. The hour-long special is hosted by CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer.

A new Video Building Activity, “The Power of Propaganda,” and a Mini Quest, “The Rights of Children,” have been published on IWitness. Each activity is also aligned with the Echoes & Reflections units on Antisemitism and The Children and Legacies Beyond the Holocaust, respectively.

Discover the testimonies of Holocaust survivors who share memories of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, which is commemorating its 80th anniversary this week as the 2016 Olympics begin in Rio de Janeiro.

Gerald Szames is 2, maybe 3 years old. He is standing at the foot of the bed, looking at his mother. She is sick, propped up on a pile of pillows. He has other flashes of memories of life before the Nazis invaded his Polish shtetl of Trochenbrod in 1941, when he was four years old – his grandfather taking him to the mill, his father lifting him up to give him a candy and a kiss.

Auschwitz: The Past is Present will support official activities of the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the German Nazi concentration and extermination camp.

The Holocaust collection in USC Shoah Foundation's Visual History Archive contains nearly 53,000 testimonies; however, only a mere six of those testimonies are from survivors who were persecuted by the Nazis for being gay: one in English, three in German, one in French, and one in Dutch. There are other gay survivors we have in the Archive, but they were persecuted by the Nazis for the greater sin of being Jewish; Gad Beck being one of them. The meager number says a lot about the history of the gay men who lived through the Nazi regime and who came out the other end willing and unafraid to speak about their lives.

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

BY STEPHEN SMITH. Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, a survivor of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi death camp in Poland, is the first person I have spoken to since the mass shooting which left eleven dead at the Tree of Life synagogue. She does not waste time greeting me in the doorway of her home in London. “So what are we going to do Stephen? We are not making progress!”

In writing the story of Polish Catholic diplomat Jan Karski, who in 1943 brought eye-witness evidence of Nazi atrocities directly to Western leaders, creators of the play and film "Remember This" had many sources to draw on. But it was Karski’s 1995 interview with the USC Shoah Foundation that was most useful in navigating the intricacies of Karski’s character, providing emotional resonance to the film.

The Following Op-Ed was published in U.S. News by the USC Shoah Foundation's Finci-Viterbi Executive Director, Robert J. Williams, Ph.D. January 27, 2025   As we commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day today and the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, we find ourselves at a critical juncture in history.

Actress, activist speaks at international symposium convened by USC Shoah Foundation and Remember the Women Institute