Ralph Leeser and his family fled to the United States from Nazi Germany in 1939. A few years later he joined the United States armed forces and helped liberate Buchenwald concentration camp. After the liberation Leeser and his fellow soldiers went to Braunau, Austria and entered Hitler's home.

More than 13,000 pre-service and in-service educators and community leaders have been trained on Echoes and Reflections, a multimedia curriculum on the Holocaust created by the the Anti-Defamation League, the USC Shoah Foundation Institute, and Yad Vashem.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) has constructed a new IWitness activity in conjunction with the museum’s Some Were Neighbors exhibit.

New University of Southern California graduate Bijou Nguyen focused on the testimonies of one of the least well-known groups persecuted during the Holocaust for her USC Libraries Award second-place research paper The Paradoxical Treatment of Male Homosexual Prisoners During the Holocaust.

A pioneering moment for Holocaust education, the world’s first virtual reality film to take audiences through a concentration camp, launches as immersive experience at four museums in New York, California, Illinois and Florida for limited-engagement exhibit.

Clara Isaacman (née Heller) est née à Borsa, en Roumanie, avant la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Sa famille quitte la Roumanie à cause de l’antisémitisme rampant et rejoint Anvers (Belgique) à la fin des années 1920, alors que Clara n’est encore qu’une enfant. Le père de Clara, Shalom, est diamantaire et possède une fabrique de soude. Clara fréquente une école hébraïque et une école publique à Anvers.

Our 10-part Echoes and Reflections series continues with Lesson 6: Jewish Resistance.

The event hosted by USC Shoah Foundation’s Center for Advanced Genocide Research appears to have been the only international academic conference to mark the 80th anniversary of this fateful event of November 1938, during which Nazis and ordinary Germans murdered more than 100 Jews and destroyed thousands of synagogues, Jewish institutions, stores and homes across Germany.

Raíssa Alonso, a PhD candidate in Social History at the University of São Paulo, Brazil, has been awarded the 2022-2023 Margee and Douglas Greenberg Research Fellowship at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research. She will be in residence at the Center in March 2023 to conduct research for her dissertation, “The ‘Other Germany’ in Brazil and the United States: Intellectuals in Exile and the Fight Against Nazism (1933-1959).”

Paul Engel was born into a middle-class Jewish family on May 4, 1922 in Vienna, Austria. He had a younger brother, Robert. When World War I broke out in 1914, his father, Eduard, was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army. Captured as a prisoner of war, he spent six years in Siberia working in a coal mine, finally reuniting with his family in 1920. In Vienna, Eduard owned a perfume wholesale business. Before the war, Paul attended a primary school and was accepted to a Gymnasium in the 14th district of Vienna.

Board of Councilors member William P. Lauder has been part of USC Shoah Foundation from its very beginning, when founder Steven Spielberg asked him to support a collection of interviews with Holocaust survivors. “We met on the Amblin backlot, in a conference room with a whiteboard that had upcoming movie ideas on it,” Lauder recalls. Over the next two decades, those interviews grew into the Visual History Archive, and Lauder has steadfastly backed the Institute ever since.

Holocaust survivor Zenon Neumark and Guatemalan Genocide survivor Aracely Garrido shared their stories of survival and their messages for the next generation at a Genocide Awarenes Month event hosted by DEFY, USC Shoah Foundation’s student organization.

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.

Renowned Holocaust scholar and former USC Shoah Foundation Yom HaShoah Scholar Professor Yehuda Bauer has given his testimony to USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive.

Wolf Gruner is the founding director of the Center. He developed the vision and main features of its now internationally recognized innovative academic program.

Echoes and Reflections reaches 10,000th educator.

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.

Hela Goldstein’s testimony given to the British Film and Photographic Unit on April 24, 1945 is believed to be the first-ever audio-visual testimony given by a Holocaust survivor. As a 22-year old victim, she spoke from Bergen-Belsen, the Nazi concentration camp where she was imprisoned upon liberation. Standing at the foot of a mass grave with her killers before her, Hela recounted what she experienced. By telling her story in the face of death, she became a foremother of testimony.

We continue the 10-part Echoes and Reflections series with Lesson 5: The "Final Solution."

USC Shoah Foundation is saddened to learn about the passing of Max Glauben, a child survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, the Majdanek and Dachau concentration camps, and a veteran of the United States Army. In 2018, Max was interviewed by USC Shoah Foundation, in association with the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum—a center he helped found—for the interactive Dimensions in Testimony exhibit. He recorded his original video testimony for USC Shoah Foundation in Dallas, Texas in 1996.

The lecture will discuss how the East Galician town of Buczacz was transformed from a site of coexistence, where Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews had lived side-by-side for centuries, into a site of genocide.

Yad Vashem has collected approximately 4.8 million pages of testimony that restore the personal identities and record the brief life stories of the six million Jews who perished at the hands of the Nazis. In honor of Yom HaShoah—Israel’s Day of Holocaust Remembrance—this webinar, led by a Yad Vashem educator, will highlight survivor testimony from Echoes & Reflections, and pages of testimony from Yad Vashem’s archive, to examine the importance of memory and how it serves us and future generations, to create a better world. This webinar is open to teachers and their students.

Senior Institute Fellow Doug Greenberg’s lecture brought to life the story of the people of Wolyn, who were slaughtered years before the most recognizable events of the Holocaust even began, yet have largely disappeared from public and scholarly memory.

Moving and powerful book about one of the world’s most profound tragedies.

Holocaust survivor Zenon Neumark and Guatemalan Genocide survivor Aracely Garrido are set to share their stories of survival and take questions from the audience.

Los Angeles, Jan. 9, 2015 – 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.The 6 p.m. event at the newly opened Wallis Annenberg Hall is free and open to the public.

Michigan student Brandon Bartley shares how testimony inspired him when he participated in the IWitness Detroit program last summer.

USC Shoah Foundation has published a new online exhibit and two new IWitness activities that expand the Institute’s educational offerings in terms of language and subject matter.

The story of Leon Bass, who took part in the liberation of Nazi concentration camps only to later face discrimination in the United States, inspires a group of dormitory RAs at the Massachusetts campus to share their own experiences of feeling excluded.

In honor of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, award-winning storyteller and photographer Rachael Cerrotti joins live via Zoom from her home in Maine to share her grandmother’s story using photographs, video, testimony, and clips from her critically-acclaimed podcast We Share the Same Sky.