As the number of Holocaust survivors dwindles, it falls to future generations to ensure their stories remain vibrant and strong.

USC Shoah Foundation and Delirio Films in association with Neko Productions have completed an animated short film that brings to life the remarkable childhood journey of Holocaust survivor Dr. Ruth K. Westheimer escaping Nazi Germany, as she faced the choices that made her who she is today.


USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research Director Wolf Gruner will give a lecture at University of Texas at Austin entitled "Defiance and Protest. Forgotten Individual Jewish Reactions to the Persecution in Nazi Germany." 

A rare collection containing hundreds of artifacts and written material brought back from Nazi Germany by an American Jewish soldier has been acquired by the USC Libraries as part of a longstanding collaboration with the USC Shoah Foundation’s Center for Advanced Genocide Research.

Holocaust survivor Gena Turgel was known in the British press as the “Bride of Belsen” for marrying a British liberator of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where she was a prisoner. She gave her testimony to USC Shoah Foundation in 1998.

Jewish survivor Rita Kuhn discusses her interest in speaking with her Nazi cousin to learn a lot more about her experiences in the Holocaust. She says that her past did not exist to her until she openly discussed it in 1985, and she was finally able to share her experiences publicly in Berlin in 1988.

Broken Silence, a “CINEMAX Reel Life” series of five documentary films by distinguished international directors, will debut on CINEMAX on five consecutive nights next April 15-19. This unique event is presented by Steven Spielberg and Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation and produced by Academy Award Winning documentary filmmaker James Moll (the Oscar-winning HBO documentary “The Last Days”), and will debut in conjunction with Holocaust Remembrance Day, Yom Hashoah.

USC Shoah Foundation is planning to record 20 new testimonies for the second phase of its North Africa and Middle East collection. Fundraising is currently underway for this phase to begin.

Our longtime friend Pinchas Gutter turns 90 today! The survivor of six German Nazi concentration camps has shared his remarkable story with USC Shoah Foundation in a variety of formats over the years, including as a Dimensions in Testimony interactive biography that has been featured by media outlets including CBS 60 Minutes and the New York Times. Earlier this year Pinchas sat down with us to reflect on contemporary events and his experiences. 

Leading American and international businessmen and philanthropists are joining forces to support the commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau on 27 January 2015.

Jewish Holocaust SurvivorInterview language: CzechVěra's mother was Otylie, Franz Kafka's sister. But the family never knew what a famous writer Franz would become many years after his death.

USC Shoah Foundation and USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism will present an advance screening on Jan. 15 of “Voices of Auschwitz,” a new CNN documentary telling the stories of four survivors from the Nazi German Concentration and extermination camp. The hour-long special is hosted by CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer, himself the son of Holocaust survivors.

USC Shoah Foundation is saddened by the recent loss of Walter P. Loebenberg, a friend of the Institute and a Holocaust survivor who, after finding refuge in the United States, went on to open the Florida Holocaust Museum, one of the largest Holocaust museums in the nation. He was 94.

Even absent this current era of “alternative facts” and “fake news,” the new Polish law making it a crime to point out Poland’s complicity in the Holocaust would be alarming.  But that it is occurring in today’s climate of demagoguery, heightened nationalism and ethnic tension – an unholy trio that threatens to metastasize on a global scale – is a troubling development. Poland’s effort has come under attack by Israel and stewards of Holocaust memory.

English and composition teacher Oriana Packer, of Brockton High School in Brockton, Mass., assigned her junior students the IWitness Video Challenge. Here, three of them share what it was like to watch testimony for the first time. (In the photo, left to right: Kweku Quansah, Lucia Ugbesia, Alexandra Eugene, Oriana Packer) When did you first learn about the Holocaust?

USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research Director Wolf Gruner will give a lecture at Cornell University, as well as conduct a workshop on testimonies from the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive."Defiance and Protest: Forgotten Individual Jewish Reactions to the Persecution in Nazi Germany"

Public lecture by Bieke Van Camp (PhD candidate, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier, France) 2018-2019 Katz Research Fellow

What makes Gad Beck’s story so remarkable, however, was that not only was he a “Mischling” but he was also a gay teenager living in Nazi Berlin, the epicenter of a military power antagonistic to both Jews and gays.

Today is International Women’s Day and this year we are honoring girls—from Holocaust Europe to Africa, from Central America to the Middle East, from occupied China to pre-war Armenia—who demonstrated extraordinary strength and resilience in the face of unimaginable horrors. Here is a selection of USC Shoah Foundation clips and films to mark the occasion.

USC Shoah Foundation mourns the passing of Betty Grebenschikoff, a Jewish Holocaust survivor, author, and speaker, who was reunited with a childhood friend in February 2021, 81 years after the pair had last seen one other in a Berlin schoolyard. The reunion, made possible by a longtime researcher at USC Shoah Foundation, touched hearts across the world.  

The Vienna native reflects on his 10-month tenure at the Institute, and the importance of the national reconciliation program that enables a select group of young Austrians to serve at organizations focused on Holocaust remembrance.

We are saddened to hear of the recent passing of Selma Engel, who, after becoming one of the few people to escape Sobibor death camp in Poland during the Holocaust, immediately began telling the world what she saw. She was 96.

It’s a story my grandfather never told me, something that I only heard and understood later, years after my mother recounted it. In 1943, after his first wife and children were killed, my grandfather, Sam Wasserman, participated in one of the only successful mass escapes from a Nazi extermination camp. He and hundreds of other prisoners, overwhelmed and killed several guards and escaped the Sobibor death camp in Poland. My grandfather eluded capture, joined a band of partisans fighting the Nazis, and shortly after surviving the war, met the woman who would become my grandmother.

Over the course of 2016, testimony from USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive contributed to a wide array of published texts, from studies about the methodology of the Institute’s interviewing and cataloguing, to wholly other subjects that pulled from the VHA to back a defined thesis.

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.

April 8 is International Roma Day, an opportunity to celebrate the Romani and Sinti culture and raise awareness about the challenges faced by Europe’s largest ethnic minority. An estimated 70 to 80 percent of Europe’s Roma and Sinti population was killed by the Nazis and their Axis partners during World War Two, a genocide with impacts that reverberate through the community today.

Freie Universität Berlin introduces multimedia archive project.

What I’ve learned, looking back at my family history and while working at USC Shoah Foundation, is how to do resistance. That’s how you do resistance. You see injustice and you tirelessly fight against it.

The Kristallnacht pogrom was a critical turning point on the path to genocide, and all of our #IWitnessChat participants agreed that using testimony is a meaningful way for students to understand and connect with the event. Hearing survivors’ detailed accounts of this night makes it much more accessible to students.

Through an analysis of testimony, students learn about the resistance efforts that took place in the Auschwitz camp complex and about the meaning of resistance in the context of the Holocaust in a new MiniQuest.