During her month in residence at USC Shoah Foundation, Walch will research the exclusion of German Jews from their own homeland during the Holocaust through Nazi policies restricting Jewish spaces and architecture.

Postgraduate scholar Yuri Radchenko is focusing his research on the Holocaust in Ukraine – something he says he would have trouble doing if he didn’t have the Visual History Archive.

The young Nazi approached 13-year-old Szulem Czygielmamn as he walked on the sidewalk of Lubartowska Street in Lublin, Poland, and shoved him off the sidewalk. Szulem was lucky; Jews had died for less.

There are many Holocaust survivors who wrote after the war about their experiences, but Beatrice Mousli Bennett is focusing her attention on writers who are far less studied: those who continued to write even while they faced occupation, deportations and oppression in the throes of World War II. Bennett is the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research’s 2016 Faculty Summer Research Fellow. The fellowship provides support for a USC faculty member to conduct research in the Visual History Archive while in residence at the Center for one month.

The USC Casden Institute for the Study of the Jewish Role in American Life proudly presents"Casden Conversations" The Powers and Perils of Nazi PropagandaSunday, March 6, 20164-5:30 p.m.USC Doheny Memorial Library room 240

Ten years ago, Sanne van Heijst was working on developing teaching materials at the museum of Konzentrationslager Herzogenbusch, or Vught, a former concentration camp in the Netherlands. Van Heijst was looking for a way to get through to the students who would visit the museum.“I was looking for a common thread that would help pupils to make a connection between the different groups of prisoners from the camp and the different events that happened,” she said.

(For directions, click here.)

Growing up, David Cook heard tales of his grandfather’s time in the service during World War II ­-- particularly how he had helped liberate Buchenwald, a Nazi concentration camp in Germany.Though his grandfather passed away in 2001, this past semester, Cook had the opportunity to dive deeper into his story and World War II in his “History of the Holocaust” course taught by Professor Adam R. Seipp, USC Shoah Foundation’s first-ever Texas A&M Teaching Fellow.

Every year, some of Angela Gottesburen’s high school seniors enter an essay contest held by the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education. This year, the students are using testimony from USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive to help craft their responses.The 2016 prompt for the Midwest Center’s annual White Rose Student Essay Contest, open to 8th-12th graders, asks students to explore how one Jewish survivor was affected by the Nazis’ anti-Jewish propaganda.

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.

The National Holocaust Centre and Museum, founded by USC Shoah Foundation Executive Director Stephen Smith and James Smith, will commemorate its 20th anniversary June 26 with a service at Westminster Abbey in London.

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.

Never forget. Never again. These are common phrases used in Holocaust and genocide education. These are important statements especially when they evoke the real reason to study, learn, and teach about genocide. We must bring this content to students to empower them and encourage them to see beyond themselves. If done right, students become aware of the steps that lead to such atrocities. Teaching about genocide is the only way to have a lasting impact on our students, to affect their worldview, to help them understand that they can make a difference.

A lecture by Atina Grossmann (Cooper Union, New York)USC Max Kade Institute for Austrian-German-Swiss Studies2714 S. Hoover St., Los Angeles CA 90070(Parking available at the Institute or on Hoover.)

Holocaust Remembrance Day, or Yom HaShoah as it’s known in Hebrew, commemorates and honors the victims and survivors of the Holocaust. This year, people around the world will remember the victims of the Holocaust May 4-5, 2016.

You never know what you will find in the Visual History Archive. You hear stories of survival, death, life, hope and even friendship amidst the chaos of genocide. Sidney Shafner and Marcel Levy have remained friends for over 70 years – since the liberation of the concentration camp Dachau.

Much like testimony shows how regimes have constructed borders; testimony demonstrates how individuals can construct bridges to connect with people of different beliefs and identities.

As the son of two survivors of the Shoah and the husband of a daughter of two survivors, identifying as the Next Generation has been the essence of who I am. It is the prism through which I see and evaluate all worldly events. It was particularly my father’s life that affected me the most. He truly was a “survivor." He survived the war running for his life through Russia, Siberian labor camps and other lands in Asia. He survived losing his parents, five of his sisters their husbands and children. He escaped from his hometown in the Russian sector to a displaced person camp in in the American sector. He survived as a refugee in Belgium and then as an immigrant in the United States. He survived the loss of his wife at a young age raising three children as a single parent in a foreign land.

As the first anniversary of my life-changing trip to Poland is upon me, I take time to reflect on the impact that trip has made on me both personally and professionally.  I have learned so much from my experiences as a teacher in USC Shoah Foundation’s and Discovery Education’s Auschwitz: The Past is Present program.

As an educator who has used IWitness to teach various subjects, units and topics here are some tips to integrating testimony into any curriculum, including Science.

The contest aims to perpetuate in students the memory of the resistance and the deportation in France during the Holocaust so that they can draw inspiration from it and draw civic lessons from it in their lives today.

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.

The theme of this year’s broadcast is “The Will to Resist” and is live now through November 10, 2016.

In January 2015, I traveled to Poland for the Auschwitz: Past is Present professional development program, commemorating the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau. This entire experience, was and continues to be a life changing event for me on every level personally, professionally, and academically.

In January 2015, I had the incredible opportunity to travel to Poland with other students from across the country for USC Shoah Foundation’s and Discovery Education’s Auschwitz: Past is Present program. We toured various sites in Warsaw and Krakow, Poland, with teachers and our friend Paula Lebovics, a survivor of the Holocaust. Each point in the trip was remarkable and extremely inspiring. However, the visit to the Auschwitz-Birkeanu Memorial Museum impacted me the most.

Alina Bothe, PhD, the 2015-2016 USC Shoah Foundation Teaching Fellow, gave a public lecture at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research focusing on the way users experience and relate to the testimonies in the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive.

This collection of photos offers a rare glimpse of an outdoor Jewish ghetto in the countryside – specifically in Kutno, Poland. The images depict a form of ghetto that was actually more common, but far less known, than the urban settings (i.e. Warsaw Ghetto) that are cemented in the public imagination.

June 20th is recognized by the United Nations as International Refugee Day to raise awareness of the plight of the refugees around the world. In the Visual History Archive, the testimonies of genocide survivors include their personal experiences as refugees. As of now, the world is facing the biggest refugee crisis since World War II. To shed light on the current and past refugee crisis explore 10 interesting facts about the refugee experience.