Virtually everyone has listened to a popular song with its lyrics changed for comedic or dramatic effect. But a perhaps little-known fact of the Holocaust is that this type of parody was also a common practice in some of the most hellish places on Earth: concentration camps.

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.

Stefan (Teofil) Kosinski’s testimony is the only English-language testimony we have in the Visual History Archive from a homosexual survivor, which is also remarkable for the fact that Stefan is not a native English speaker.

As part of USC Shoah Foundation’s Preserving the Legacy initiative, 281 testimonies from Holocaust Museum Houston are currently being indexed for integration into the Visual History Archive.

Three Holocaust survivors describe incredible stories of how music quite literally saved their lives in the Days of Remembrance film Music Saved My Life.

The Holocaust collection in USC Shoah Foundation's Visual History Archive contains nearly 53,000 testimonies; however, only a mere six of those testimonies are from survivors who were persecuted by the Nazis for being gay: one in English, three in German, one in French, and one in Dutch. There are other gay survivors we have in the Archive, but they were persecuted by the Nazis for the greater sin of being Jewish; Gad Beck being one of them. The meager number says a lot about the history of the gay men who lived through the Nazi regime and who came out the other end willing and unafraid to speak about their lives.

The initiative will use the Institute’s state-of-the-art infrastructure to digitize, index and integrate videotaped Holocaust testimony taken by other organizations around the world into the Visual History Archive.

The many artworks, films and books that emerged from the Holocaust are the topic of a course to be taught next semester at USC.

The academic conference hosted by USC Shoah Foundation last week was an excellent opportunity for me to hear the personal stories of survivors alongside academic analysis of modern-day events and future challenges. I attended the keynote panel discussion and the final discussion on the future of testimony and genocide study.