USC Shoah Foundation mourns the loss of the Holocaust survivor and recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, who passed away on April 3, 2022. She was 97.

For Women’s History Month, bring the unique voices of women who survived or stood up against some of the worst atrocities of the 20th century into your classroom. Facing History is partnering with USC Shoah Foundation to help educators access more than 1,500 video testimonies of survivors and witnesses to the Holocaust and other genocides using the Institute’s online learning tool, IWitness.

Professor Jan Grabowski, a distinguished scholar of the Holocaust in Poland will serve as the 2022-2023 Sara and Asa Shapiro Scholar in Residence at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research and USC Shoah Foundation. He will deliver the Annual Sara and Asa Shapiro Lecture, entitled "Holocaust in Poland: New Research, New Findings", and spend a week in residence at the Center and USC Shoah Foundation in March 2023.

Professor Jan Grabowski, a distinguished scholar of the Holocaust in Poland will serve as the 2022-2023 Sara and Asa Shapiro Scholar in Residence at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research and USC Shoah Foundation. He will deliver the Annual Sara and Asa Shapiro Lecture, entitled "Holocaust in Poland: New Research, New Findings", and spend a week in residence at the Center and USC Shoah Foundation in March 2023.

By the time they’re 88 years old, most people start thinking about slowing down. But not Claude Lanzmann. The French journalist and documentarian is about to release his seventh film, The Last of the Unjust – a three hour and 40 minute examination of Rabbi Benjamin Murmelstein, the last president of the Jewish Council of the Theresienstadt ghetto in Czechoslovakia.

The portrait I have been working on of Dario isn’t complete yet, but what an honor it was to have met him and is now to engage with his testimony through the act of painting,” said David Kassan of hi

Co-sponsored by U.S. Mission to the UN in observance of International Day of Commemoration.

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.

We are very saddened at the USC Shoah Foundation to learn that our friend and Holocaust survivor Cantor Moshe Taube has passed away at age 93. Cantor Taube was among 1,200 Jews saved by Oskar Schindler during the Holocaust and led in the chanting of prayers at Congregation Beth Shalom in Pittsburgh.

Over a dozen new multimedia activities in a variety of languages have been published on IWitness in time for the new school year.

As the world watches in horror as millions of Ukrainians resist, take shelter or flee from Russian attacks, news reports stir up connections to a haunting past. We scanned our Visual History Archive to bring just a few stories from these places to light. The words of survivors, as they often do, reach forward through time.

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 is sorry to learn of the passing of Aleksander Laks, the first Holocaust survivor to give his testimony to USC Shoah Foundation in Brazil and a special friend of the Institute. Laks passed away July 21 at age 88.Laks survived the Lodz Ghetto, Auschwitz and a death march as a teenager. He immigrated to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and became a leader of the survivor community there as president of the Sherit Hapleita (Holocaust survivors’ organization).

Giving his testimony to USC Shoah Foundation in 1998 literally changed Hyman Schwartzblatt’s life.Schwartzblatt’s grandson, Jewish music producer and composer Eli Gerstner, said Schwartzblatt told his family almost nothing about his experiences during the Holocaust. And when he did happen to make an offhand comment about his survival, they never knew what to make of it. What was the truth?

Growing up, Fred Wysoki knew both his parents were Holocaust survivors, but didn’t know much about their experience beyond that.“Subconsciously, I knew that [talking about it] was painful, and I honored that by not upsetting either one of them with prying questions,” he said.

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.

Leading up to the one-year anniversary of the deadly synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh, USC Shoah Foundation staff members trained educators in that metro area last week about how to use video testimonies of Holocaust witnesses as a tool to teach empathy, understanding and respect.

USC Shoah Foundation is sorry to learn of the passing of Aleksander Laks, the first Holocaust survivor to give his testimony to USC Shoah Foundation in Brazil and a special friend of the Institute. Laks passed away July 21 at age 88. Laks survived the Lodz Ghetto, Auschwitz and a death march as a teenager. He immigrated to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and became a leader of the survivor community there as president of the Sherit Hapleita (Holocaust survivors’ organization).

Suzette Sheft first recognized the importance of recording family history when it was already too late. As a young child, the New York City student had regularly listened to her father’s stories, but when he died of pancreatic cancer when she was just 13, she realized she was unable to remember many of them. “When he was alive, he would tell me stories about his life while tucking me in each night, but in the months following his death, I found myself forgetting many of his recollections,” Suzette said.

von Frijtag questioned commonly-held perceptions about relations between Dutch Jews and gentiles during the Holocaust during her tenure as USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research’s 2017-2018 Center Fellow.

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.

Anita Lasker-Wallfisch had a lucky moment while being processed at the Sauna in Auschwitz-Birkenau.  One of the girls processing her asked her what she did prior to landing in that place of unspeakable horror. “I played the cello,” she answered. That surreal conversation, not far from the gas chambers at Birkenau, would save her life.  As a member of the Auschwitz women's orchestra, playing the cello meant respite from heavy labor.  

Like many Holocaust survivors, Joe Adamson had been reluctant to speak of his experiences, which included a series of relocations brought about by the rise of Nazism: from his birthplace in Koenigsberg, Germany to Frankfurt Oder to live with his grandparents—whose house was ransacked on Kristallnacht—and then to England on the Kindertransport when he was 14, arriving at Weston-at-the-Sea with a small suitcase and no knowledge of English. Later, he worked as a translator for the U.S. Army on a team that interrogated Nazis and was at the front with troops who liberated Mauthausen.

A Modern Germany history course taught by Longwood University Professor Melissa Kravetz received an honorable mention for “Interesting Assignment” from the H-German online network for its IWitness-based final assignment.

The University of Haifa has become the first university in Israel with access to the USC Shoah Foundation Institute’s Visual History Archive, a searchable repository of nearly 52,000 video interviews with Holocaust survivors and other witnesses.

Mireille Knoll managed to survive the Nazis during the Holocaust, but antisemitism is ancient and tenacious, and its tentacles finally caught up with her last week at her home in Paris. The 85-year-old Knoll was stabbed 11 times and burned after attackers – a neighbor and a homeless man – tried to set her apartment ablaze. The men, both in their 20s, were later arrested for a crime that is being investigated as an antisemitic attack. “She’s a Jew, she must have money,” said one attacker to the other, according to Gérard Collomb, the interior minister of France.

Called “Cake For Winter,” the sketch by Amanda Andrei stems from a little-known fact that was also unknown to her: During World War II, thousands of Americans and Europeans were interned at Japanese-run concentration camps in the Philippines. It was selected to be performed by actors at the Midwest Dramatists Conference in Kansas.

Bartov centered his discussion on how the East Galician town of Buczacz was transformed from a site of coexistence – where Poles, Ukrainians and Jews had all lived side-by-side for centuries – into a site of genocide during World War II.

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.