USC Shoah Foundation on Monday Mar. 27 and on Friday Mar. 31 celebrated the completion of a years-long endeavor to integrate hundreds of testimonies from the Armenian Genocide into the Visual History Archive.

The USC Shoah Foundation mourns the passing of our friend Dr. Richard Gable Hovannisian, a scholar who devoted his life to chronicling the 1915 Armenian Genocide and donated the more than 1,000 survivor and witness testimonies he amassed to the USC Shoah Foundation. He was 90. Born to Armenian Genocide survivors in Tulare, California, in 1932, Dr. Hovannisian was initially discouraged from learning his parents’ language and knew little about Armenian history.

Fifteen hours of interviews related to a group of World War II-era diplomats who defied official policies to save hundreds of thousands of people from the Holocaust are to be integrated into the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive.

Genocide survivor Consolée Uwamariya learns video testimony indexing.

I expected to feel an intimate and profound connection to Auschwitz after touring the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum for the first time late last month. After three consecutive days visiting and working at the museum, I was indeed moved. But the insight I was hoping for came from beyond the well-worn paths of tourists, from a source that hits close to home here at USC Shoah Foundation.

From September 11 to September 14, 2016, the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide hosted the international conference "A Conflict? Genocide and Resistance in Guatemala."

Alan Rose was repeating himself. He was stuck in a particularly difficult part of his story about being deported from a labor camp to Buchenwald Concentration Camp. Josh Turnil and the guests he had invited to hear Alan’s story in Josh’s Paris living room that January 2019 evening – about 20 people of all ages tucked into sofas and folding chairs – gently helped Alan along. After Alan had finished speaking, Josh’s teenage son sat at the piano and played a slow, jazzy melody with a repeating refrain that reflected the circularity of memory.

A handful of witnesses in the genocide trial against former Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt appear in Pamela Yates’ film “500 Years,” but her cameras captured the entire proceeding. The case is considered a landmark in human rights law.

Last week a group of us from USC Shoah Foundation were in Guatemala with our testimony partner, the Foundation for Forensic Anthropology in Guatemala (FAFG). We attended the funeral of a Mayan man whose remains were recently exhumed by FAFG – 36 years after he disappeared during the genocide there.

Anna Lee, the 2019 Beth and Arthur Lev Student Research Fellow at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research, gave a public lecture about her research on survivor activism as a form of healing in the aftermath of mass executions during genocide and contemporary school mass shootings. During her one-month residency at the Center, Lee conducted comparative research on the topic by examining both survivor testimonies housed in the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive and accounts of school shootings survivors found in media and other sources.

The USC Shoah Foundation Institute and the Armenian Film Foundation sign historic agreement.

The Institute mourns the passing of members of our community in 2021, including survivors who have given testimony Julio Botton, Fritzie Fritzshall, Eddie Jaku, Roman Kent, Rabbi Bent Melchior, Ruth Pearl, Suzy Ressler, Irving Roth, and Marcus Segal.

Annabel Carballo-Mesa is a PhD candidate at the University of Barcelona. Since January 17 she has been in Los Angeles conducting research with Visual History Archive (VHA) testimonies for a dissertation provisionally entitled “Na Bister! (Don’t Forget!) An Oral History of the Roma and Sinti Genocide”.

    -   Invitación para presentación de propuestas IX Conferencia Internacional de la INoGS Genocidio y comunidades sobrevivientes: agencia, resistencia, reconocimiento 23-26 de junio de 2024 University of Southern California Los Ángeles En el territorio ancestral y no cedido de las naciones de Tongva y Kizh

 

In a five-hour interview with USC Shoah Foundation, Justus Rosenberg refers to himself as “small fry,” “a cog,” an unimportant person. And perhaps it was for this reason that for decades, the Bard College literature professor hadn’t let on—to his colleagues, to his students, and even, for a time, to his own wife—that he had fought and outwitted the Nazis during World War II to save thousands from persecution.

Educators share how they teach with eyewitness testimony for April's Genocide Awareness Month.

Over the course of the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research’s three-day conference “A Conflict? Genocide and Resistance in Guatemala,” over a dozen scholars from all over the world gave presentations about their research on various aspects of the Guatemalan Genocide. Here is a sample of just a few of those presentations.