There are no certain guides for rebuilding a society in the aftermath of systematic violence and genocide against one of its populations and its culture. Nevertheless, some societies address their histories more effectively than others, as found by Anika Walke, a German expat working as an assistant professor of History at Washington University in St. Louis.

We are sad to learn of the passing of Kurt Messerschmidt, Holocaust survivor, educator and beloved cantor. He was 102. Messerschmidt was born Jan. 2, 1915 in Weneuchen, Germany, but moved to Berlin in 1918 and excelled as a linguistics scholar, gymnast and musician. He was well-respected and a leader among his classmates and teachers, but was unable to attend college because of anti-Jewish measures implemented by the Nazis.

Kari Shagena is combining poetry and Holocaust survivor testimony to inspire empathy and action in her students following an IWitness seminar in Michigan last summer. Shagena, a language arts and social studies teacher at Richmond Middle School, was one of over dozen Michigan educators who attended USC Shoah Foundation’s IWitness Summer Institute in Farmington Hills this past August, a three-day seminar that introduced educators to everything they need to know to incorporate testimonies and activities from IWitness into their classrooms.

Griffin Williams is challenging assumptions held by some of the most famous names in Holocaust scholarship as a DEFY Undergraduate Research Fellow at USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research this summer.

Marisa Fox-Bevilacqua grew up never knowing that her mother was a Holocaust survivor. That is, until a series of discoveries after her mother’s death led her to the truth: her mother had survived Gabersdorf, a slave labor camp for Jewish girls and young women, for four and a half years – and had never said a word about it.

We at USC Shoah Foundation are saddened to hear of the passing of our beloved friend, Holocaust survivor and renowned artist Alice Lok Cahana, who passed away on November 28 at age 88. Through her internationally acclaimed artwork, writings, and public speaking, Alice put forth a message to the world that both memorialized those who perished during the Holocaust and celebrated the strength of the human spirit.

USC Shoah Foundation is saddened to learn of the passing of Holocaust survivor Curt Lowens, a wartime hero who became a well-known character actor when he moved to the United States. He was 91. Born Curt Lowenstein on Nov. 17, 1925 in Germany, Lowen and his family had planned to emigrate to the United States as World War II was starting, but they were stopped from leaving the Netherlands when the Germans invaded that country. He was briefly deported to the Westerbork concentration camp in 1943, but he was released because of his father’s business connections.

At the behest of his father, 17-year-old Erwin Rautenberg boarded a steamer for South America in 1937 to escape Nazi Germany. His brother, sister, and parents planned to join him, but never made it. His father died in 1938, soon after being
forced into the German army. The rest of the family was killed during the Holocaust.

For a historian, using a top-down approach is standard – you use government records, archives of primary and secondary sources to fulfill your research; you undress the documents and make sure they stand up, factually, and you stop there. But a bottom-up approach can provide a more complete image of an event, allowing those who lived through the time a voice in history.

Just over halfway into her month-long residency at USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research, 2016-2017 Greenberg Research Fellow Katja Schatte has already surpassed her expectations about what she would discover in the Visual History Archive. Schatte sat down for a Facebook Live interview about her research and her fellowship at the Center. She will give a public lecture about her work on March 7 on the USC campus.

Professor Omer Bartov, considered one of the world’s leading experts on the subject of the Holocaust, will serve as the 2016-2017 Sara and Asa Shapiro Scholar in Residence at USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research. He will be in residence at the Center May 4-11, 2017, and will give a public lecture at USC on May 8.

Professor Jessica Marglin is passionate about the testimonies of Sephardic Jews in the Visual History Archive, and that passion has rubbed off onto her students as well. Marglin is Ruth Ziegler Early Career Chair in Jewish Studies and Assistant Professor of Religion at the University of Southern California. She is a scholar of the history of Jews in the Middle East and teaches an undergraduate course about Sephardic Jews during the Holocaust.

Maria Zalewska grew up in what acclaimed writer and journalist Martin Pollack calls the “contaminated landscapes” of Eastern Europe, where most of the Nazi concentration camps and extermination camps were built. Her physical proximity to spaces of the Shoah, as well as her familial relationships to victims of Auschwitz-Birkenau, drew her initially toward the study of the different ways in which Eastern Europeans filled, organized and produced spaces of memory.

As a little kid, Toni Nickel never could settle between Sesame Street and the History Channel, her interest in other people’s stories of war piqued such that learning the colors and the order of the numbers became forever secondary. Her curiosity – specifically in the Holocaust – came to a head in college when she took a History of the Holocaust course that used the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive. There, in a classroom at Texas A&M University, Nickel knew her fate and future were sealed.

As a documentary filmmaker, historian and curator, Christian Delage has long consulted with and used video testimonies of Holocaust survivors in his work.

Twelve years after the last federally operated Indian Residential School closed in 1996, the government of Canada apologized to the system’s survivors. They’d been put through so much they hadn’t deserved, from forced removals from their families and communities to deprivations of food, their ancestral languages, adequate sanitation; from forced labor and adherence to the Christian faith to physical abuse.

Even after using testimony in her teaching and research for several years, Professor Shira Klein still discovered something new during her tenure as the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research 2016-2017 International Teaching Fellow. The annual International Teaching Fellowship is open to professors who wish to incorporate testimony into their courses and research. The chosen fellow has the opportunity to visit the Center and consult with its staff and gives a public lecture at USC about their work.