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.

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.

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

In her public lecture on Feb. 9, 2017, at USC, Robert J. Katz Research Fellow Teresa Walch outlines the process by which Jews in Berlin lost their rights, access to public spaces, ability to move freely, and finally their own homes, from 1933-38. Throughout her talk, Walch refers to the testimonies in the Visual History Archive that she has discovered of Holocaust survivors who describe living through this period and its effect on them.

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.

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.

A public lecture organized by Holocaust Museum LA Join author Wolf Gruner as he discusses his new book, a highly original and compelling account of individual Jews who resisted Nazi persecution, challenging the traditional portrayal of Jewish passivity during the Holocaust.   RSVP here

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

July 24, 2014: Harry Reicher, Professor of Law at University of Pennsylvania and USC Shoah Foundation's inaugural Rutman Teaching Fellow, utilized his fellowship to collect Holocaust survivor testimony content he could utilize in his classes, which currently make liberal use of multimedia content.Featuring historical footage, Nazi propaganda film, modern cinema clips, and Visual History Archive testimony, Reicher's lecture provided an overview of the Nazi legal system and demonstrated the value of film in teaching this subject.

Attendees tour Holocaust-related sites.

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.

A public lecture by Christopher R. Browning (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) 2017-2018 Sara and Asa Shapiro Scholar in Residence

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.

Los Angeles, Sept. 28, 2017 – USC Shoah Foundation is announcing the release of Lala, a virtual reality film and educational resource that tells the true story of a dog that brightened the lives of a family interned by the Nazis in a ghetto in Poland during the Holocaust.

“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.

An online lecture by Alexandra Szabó (PhD candidate in History, Brandeis University) 2022-2023 Strauss Fellow at the Cedars-Sinai Center for Medicine, Holocaust and Genocide Studies Visiting scholar at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research, Summer 2023

Offered by USC Shoah Foundation and Discovery Education in support of the official 70th anniversary commemoration of the liberation of the former German Nazi concentration and death camp.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.