USC Shoah Foundation

Do you know a Holocaust survivor with an experience to share? IWitness is the Institute’s signature educational website for teachers and their students.

USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education is dedicated to making audio-visual interviews with survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust and other genocides a compelling voice for education and action. The Institute currently has more than 55,000 video testimonies, each one a unique source of insight and knowledge that oﬀers powerful stories from history that demand to be

explored and shared. The testimonies are preserved in the Visual History Archive, one of the largest digital collections of its kind in the world. They average a little over two hours each in length and were conducted in 62 countries and 41 languages. The vast majority of the testimonies contain a complete personal history of life before, during, and after the interviewee’s firsthand experience with genocide. The Visual History Archive is digitized, fully searchable via indexed keywords, and hyperlinked to the minute. With more than 115,000 hours of testimony stored in the Archive, indexing technology is essential for enabling users to pinpoint topics of interest. Indexing allows students, teachers, professors, researchers and others around the world to retrieve entire testimonies or search for specific sections within testimonies through a set of more than 64,800 keywords and phrases, 1.86 million names, and 718,000 images. Using testimony from the Visual History Archive, the Institute has developed innovative learning tools geared toward middle and high school students and teacher training programs that optimize the use of testimony in diverse educational settings worldwide – providing an experience that takes students beyond textbooks for more impactful learning. The free site has been used by students and educators in all 50 states and over 80 countries including Poland, Czech Republic, Ukraine, Hungary, Australia and France. Stored on the IWitness platform are 2,224 full-length testimonies from the Visual History Archive. The platform’s built-in learning activities are designed around short, curated clips. IWitness learning activities enhance existing curriculum across many subject areas including social studies, English Language Arts, government, foreign language, world history, American history, and character education. The Center for Advanced Genocide Research is the research and scholarship unit of the Institute. Founded in 2014, the Center is dedicated to advancing new areas of interdisciplinary research on the Holocaust and genocide, specifically discussing the origins of genocide and how to intervene in the cycle that leads to mass violence. The Center holds international conferences and workshops and hosts fellows and scholars in residence to conduct research using the vast resources available at the University of Southern California. It distinguishes itself by focusing on interdisciplinary study organized around three themes to advance the analysis of genocide and systematic mass violence on an international scale.

06/19/2026

“The norm of this society does not necessarily include you.”

The 2026 Daniel & Marisa Klass USC Shoah Foundation , hosted by Dr. Brian Hughes, Director of the USC Shoah Foundation Countering Antisemitism Lab, brings together leading scholars and practitioners to offer insight to examine contemporary antisemitism.

Dr. Mara Lee Grayson, researcher, author, educator, and expert in antisemitism and racism in higher education, discusses the “myth of Jewish whiteness” and how societal norms often cater to Christianity.

Watch the full episode on our YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/a0SwWGh4jQI?si=oFUOMoqVPhO7mFL-

06/18/2026

We congratulate Holocaust Museum L.A. and the Goldrich family on the opening of the Goldrich Cultural Center—a newly expanded campus dedicated to education, remembrance, dialogue, and community that continues the vision of Jona Goldrich and the museum’s founding Holocaust survivors.

The new center showcases multiple exhibits, including “The Beautiful Game..The Untold Story” which explores the Jewish impact on the game of soccer, and a state-of-the-art theater featuring the interactive biography (Dimensions in Testimony) of Holocaust survivor Renee Firestone.

We look forward to sharing the new space with our community.

Photos: Steve Cohn Photography

06/17/2026

Renowned theoretical physicist Albert Einstein officially left his home country of Germany in 1933 and renounced his citizenship after learning that the Gestapo had raided his Berlin apartment and his summer home in Caputh. An outspoken critic of the N**i regime, he became a target: his works were burned in 1933, and a bounty was placed on his head.

Einstein worked to save as many Jews from N**i persecution as he could, issuing affidavits to help Jewish refugees to immigrate to the U.S. and urging other influential figures to do the same. Various survivors in our Archive recall Einstein’s support and the role he played in helping them escape persecution.

06/16/2026

Watch "The Last Twins," a documentary about a Erno "Zvi" Spiegel, a man who risked his life to protect dozens of young boys targeted by Dr. Josef Mengele during the Holocaust: https://www.pbs.org/show/the-last-twins/

New Documentary Alert: The Last Twins chronicles the story of Erno “Zvi” Spiegel, who was imprisoned under infamous N**i doctor Josef Mengele. At age 29, Spiegel entered Auschwitz, where Mengele, known for his grotesque experiments on twins, put Spiegel in charge of the children due to his past as a soldier.

Spiegel, who was also often subject to Mengele's experiments because he was a twin himself, did everything he could to protect his people. He changed two brothers' birth dates to the same date after they had been mistakenly identified as twins – saving them from being sent to gas chambers like too many other children. He taught the children math and geography. He quickly became known as “Spiegel Bácsi” – Uncle Spiegel – amongst his cohort of young boys. After liberation, Spiegel took his boys with him to Hungary and Czechoslovakia, securing paperwork that designated them as Auschwitz refugees. The group eventually grew to 153 people, traveling for nearly two months to reach safety.

Documentaries like The Last Twins, now available to stream on PBS, are crucial to honoring and preserving the voices that ensure history is never forgotten.

🎥 Watch here: tinyurl.com/m5a3b7ay

06/15/2026

“God don’t make no junk.”

Holocaust survivor Vera Ray, who began to identify as a le***an later in her life, shares the advice she would give her grandchildren on being proud of who you are.

This , we’re spotlighting LGBTQIA+ survivors and witnesses from our Archive, who share their experiences of survival, resistance, rescue, and loss.

06/11/2026

“Sometimes you have to go back to move forward.”

Join us in Los Angeles on June 22 for the world premiere of “My Name is Gitta,” a brand-new documentary about a Holocaust survivor’s journey to uncover her past.

Learn more about the screening: https://danceswithfilms.ticketspice.com/dwfla-my-name-is-gitta

About the film:
Gitta is a vivacious nonagenarian holocaust survivor who has long ago processed and overcome her childhood trauma, and for decades has been telling her story of recovery and forgiveness at schools. But as she retraces her steps across Europe and reconnects with families and organizations that saved her life, she finds there is always more to uncover.

06/10/2026

During a period of forced labor in Capljina (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Yugoslavia) Holocaust survivor Marion Horn remembers a small act of humanity by an Italian soldier.

Marion’s testimony was recorded by the USC Shoah Foundation in 1995.

06/10/2026

This , we’re spotlighting LGBTQIA+ survivors and witnesses from our Archive, who share their experiences of survival, resistance, rescue, and loss.

Holocaust survivor Gad Beck describes the moment he came out as gay to his family.

Read more about Gad at the link in our bio.

06/06/2026

in 1944, more than 150,000 Allied troops (primarily American, British, and Canadian) came ashore on the beaches of Normandy, France, as part of Operation Overlord, one of the most important Allied military operations of WWII.

WWII veteran and liberator Joseph Abrahams recalls the day he and his unit stepped onto the beaches of Normandy on . Joseph was a member of the Royal Army Medical Corps and he worked at a field dressing station, tending to immediate injuries before sending soldiers to the hospital.

06/05/2026

We mourn the loss of Barbara Byer, USC Shoah Foundation interviewer who conducted more than 100 interviews from 1996-2024. She passed away in May at the age of 87.

Barbara was an active interviewer for the USC Shoah Foundation from 1996 until 2001, completing 88 interviews in Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania.

From 2008 to 2009, she completed 5 interviews for the Florida Holocaust Documentation and Education Center; these testimonies are now held in the USC Shoah Foundation Archive. She returned to conduct 20 more interviews in the past three years for our new Holocaust survivor testimony collection.

We are deeply grateful for Barbara’s commitment to preservation and for her lasting contributions to the USC Shoah Foundation.

May her memory be a blessing.

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