Professor Marion Kaplan, 2018-2019 Sara and Asa Shapiro Scholar in Residence at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research, gave the annual Shapiro Scholar public lecture on gender and the Holocaust.

Public lecture by Gabór Tóth (University of Oxford, History) 2018-2019 Center Postdoctoral Research Fellow

At UNESCO’s Paris headquarters on Jan. 27, USC Shoah Foundation Finci-Viterbi Executive Director Stephen Smith will host a panel discussion following a screening of “Who Will Write Our History,” a documentary by Director Roberta Grossman and Executive Producer Nancy Spielberg that chronicles a covert effort by a group of resistance fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto who amassed an archive of documents that would later shed light on the Nazi atrocities that occurred there.

Bieke Van Camp, the 2018-2019 Robert J.

Maël LeNoc, a PhD Candidate in Geography at Texas State University, has been awarded the 2019-2020 Margee and Douglas Greenberg Research Fellowship at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research.

The news about a group of teenagers throwing a Nazi salute at a party in Orange County is a startling reminder that knowledge of the Holocaust is fading. Here are four free online classroom-ready activities on IWitness that address the topics of antisemitism, bystanders and hatred.

About a month before the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, sparking World War II, a desperate Jewish father in Germany penned a letter in broken English to a friend in England, Mrs. Wolf.  “I beg to inform you that we have got a refuse from the Aid Committee in London, owing to our high waiting number for America. … We are very discouraged by this answer and are now forced to get out our children as quick as possible.” Alfons Lasker, an attorney in Breslau, was on a mission to get his two daughters – Anita and Renate – out of Germany. He did not succeed.

Gabor Toth, 2018-2019 Center Postdoctoral Research Fellow, gave a public lecture at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research focusing on his project to find, represent, and reflect on victims’ experiences during the Holocaust. 

On January 25, 2019, the fifth- and sixth-graders of a school in Cottbus, Germany honored all those affected during the Holocaust by unveiling a Butterfly Project memorial to the 1.5 million children murdered during this dark moment in history. This first-ever initiative in Germany introduced a new, younger audience to real stories of local children.

USC Shoah Foundation, Blavatnik Archive partner on adding soldiers’ narratives to searchable database. The project expands focus on veterans discussing their daily lives, Jewish experience before and during WWII.

In the 1980s, a tiny woman in her 50s named Ruth Westheimer shocked and delighted the world with her blunt advice – delivered in a grandmotherly German accent – about sex. She became a media sensation and remains a household name as “Dr. Ruth.” Less known is her perilous journey to get there – a story that includes her survival of the Holocaust and immigration to British-controlled Mandatory Palestine, where she briefly became a sniper in a Jewish paramilitary force.

Today we mourn the loss of one of our closest friends, Branko Lustig, a Holocaust survivor and two-time Academy Award winner who produced Schindler’s List and played an indispensable role in the founding of USC Shoah Foundation. He was 87. Shortly after the film’s 1993 release, Lustig -- who witnessed horrific atrocities at Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and other concentration and labor camps -- led the drive to implement Steven Spielberg’s vision of collecting 50,000 Holocaust testimonies for what was then called Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation.

Painter David Kassan has sat with survivors of the Holocaust for countless hours during the past five years, carefully listening to their stories of pain, grief, resilience and quiet victory.

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.