voices from the visual history archive...

PastForward

Changing the World through TestimonyTwenty years after the first testimonies were taken,

the Visual History Archive is reaching even more people

TH E D I G E S T O F U S C S HOAH F OUNDAT I ON – TH E I N S T I T U T E F O R V I S U A L H I S T O R Y A ND E DU C AT I ON

Voices from the Visual History Archiveroman kent

The Killer WithinWhat The Act of Killing bringsto our understanding of violenceted braun and joshua oppenheimer

Big Data & HumanityHow scholars can harness big data to learn, teach, and healsteve kay

Spring 2014Special 20th Anniversary Issue

Board of CouncilorsSteven SpielbergHonorary Chair

Edgar M. BronfmanHonorary Co-chairin Memoriam

Renée Crown Honorary Co-chair

Lew WassermanHonorary Co-chair in Memoriam

Robert J. KatzChair

Susan CrownVice Chair

Harry L. RobinsonVice Chair

Wallis AnnenbergRussel S. BernardGerald Breslauer*Joel CitronJerome Coben*Stephen CozenDavid EismanPhyllis EpsteinAnita FriedmanEmanuel Gerard*Eric GreenbergMarcy B. GringlasYossie HollanderWilliam LauderLee LibermanBruce RamerMichael Rutman*Mickey ShapiroErna Viterbi

*Emeritus member

Next Generation CouncilSusan CrownNational Chair

Dan AdlerVice Chair

Marcy B. GringlasVice Chair

Andy IntraterVice Chair

Edward SassowerVice Chair

Wendy SassowerVice Chair

David Adelman Carole BlumCecilia ChanUlrika CitronMarsha DworkinLori FifeMark Gordon Harry KrakowskiJoshua NashLindy SniderMichael Wunderman

Founding ExecutiveDirectorsJune BeallorJames Moll

Founding AdvisoryCommitteeKaren KushellBranko LustigGerald R. Molen

Executive StaffStephen D. SmithExecutive Director

Kim SimonManaging Director

Sam GustmanChief Technology Officer

Karen JungblutDirector of Research and Documentation

Anita PaceDirector of Technology

Anne Marie SteinDirector of Communications

Kori StreetDirector of Education

Ari ZevDirector ofAdministration

USCShoahFoundatione Institute for Visual History and Education

pastforward Spring 2014 1

PastForwardSpring 2014

Features

SPECIAL ANNIVERSARY FEATURE

19 Twenty Years LaterThe legacy of Schindler’s List and the USC Shoah Foundation

REAL-TIME TESTIMONY

22 Resisting the Path to GenocideCollecting testimony in real time as events are unfoldingBy Mukesh Kapila

BIG DATA AND HUMANITY

24 Using Stories as Data andData to Tell StoriesHow scholars can harness big data to learn, teach, and healBy Steve Kay

GENOCIDE IN FILM

26 The Killer WithinWhat The Act of Killing brings to our understanding of violenceBy Ted Braun and Joshua Oppenheimer

“Twenty years after the start of the Shoah Foundation we are doing more than I could have ever imagined with that simple notion of documentation, that concept of examining the historical record for the purposes of remembering it and reflect-ing upon it so that with a camera and a clear mission of genocide prevention, we are both teaching toler-ance and inspiring the otherwise indifferent.” –Steven Spielberg, page 3

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Managing EditorKrystal Szabo

Editorial TeamStephen D. SmithKim SimonAnne Marie Stein

WritersJosh GrossbergRobin Migdol

DesignRick Simner Design

Cover PhotoDavid Strick

PrintingColorGraphics, Inc.

2 pastforward Spring 2014 Edouard Bamporiki, page 13

Essays

10 THE LEGACY OF TESTIMONY

The Next GenerationBy Esther Toporek Finder

11 TESTIMONY AROUND THE WORLD

Teaching the Holocaust in ChinaBy Xu Xin

Connecting with ChinaBy Zhu Chengshan

13 THE POETRY OF TESTIMONY

Voice in the DarknessStephen D. Smith interviews Edouard Bamporiki

14 CONNECTING WITH TESTIMONY

The Ethics of the AlgorithmBy Todd Presner

16 CHARTING THE WORLD WITH TESTIMONY

A New MethodologyBy Tim Cole, Alberto Giordano, Anne Kelly Knowles, and Paul B. Jaskot

A Map to PreventionBy Samuel Gustman

18 UNDERSTANDING TESTIMONY

Emotion, Storytelling, and the Human UniversalsBy Antonio Damasio

29 SHARING ART THROUGH TESTIMONY

An Artist’s PerspectiveBy Stacie Chaiken

30 TESTIMONY IN ACTION

Anti-Semitism in HungaryBy Péter Krekó

32 REFINDING THE PAST

The Last of the UnjustStephen D. Smith interviews Claude Lanzmann

33 UNDERSTANDING TESTIMONY

Beyond EvilBy Ervin Staub

35 TESTIMONY ON LOCATION

It Happened Here, Right HereBy Kim Simon, Martin Šmok,and Andrea Szőnyi

36 TESTIMONY AROUND THE WORLD

Building Dams and BridgesBy Anne-Marie Revcolevschi

Departments

3 FOUNDER’S LETTER

Camera-ReadyBy Steven Spielberg

4 Contributors

7 EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR’S LETTER

Expanding the VisionBy Stephen D. Smith

8 Voices from the Visual History ArchiveRoman Kent

38 News & Events

40 Ambassadors forHumanity

Roman Kent, page 8

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PastForward Founder’s Letter

Documentary filmmaking is a mirror-image art form. More thanmost other art forms, it asks us to examine reality, to evaluate our own behaviorrelative to the subject matter, and to consider what the particular historical ac-count means to our life today, what it has perhaps meant to our ancestors, andwhat, in these examinations, it might mean in years to come.

I am a big believer in storyboarding. I think it is important to have a blueprintfor the camera work and for the particular story I want to tell. But 20 years ago,with Schindler’s List, I tossed out the window my penchant for planning, to em-ploy what I call a “news camera” approach. To effectively show the atrocities ofthe Holocaust and the difference that Oskar Schindler made in the lives of manysurvivors, I felt that I needed the camera to be embedded in the environment wewere in—handheld at times, uncompromising in its presence, and omniscientin its impact. I needed it to be indistinguishable, unpredictable, and impercep-tible to all of us on the set. To the best of my ability, I wanted to feel that all of uswere there documenting the horrors of the Holocaust, not re-creating them.

Yes, this was the narrative of a single man and his efforts to ensure the safetyof Jews, but it was a philosophical account—one of death, of life, of intoleranceand bigotry, and of the dishonorable part of the human condition that has, forcenturies, condoned and ignored crimes of genocide. While the story of OskarSchindler and the people he rescued may serve as a microcosm for the eventssurrounding the mass murder of 6 million Jews, it was important to me, as afilmmaker and a Jew, that we do our best to properly recall the ultimate con-sequences of the Holocaust and the role of the war itself in these considerablecrimes against humanity. That is something that could not be done in its en-tirety during the making of Schindler’s List. In fact, it required me to take my“news camera” approach and apply it to the creation of the Shoah Foundation.

In 1945, when General Dwight D. Eisenhower rightly predicted Holocaustdeniers, he ordered the photographing and documentation of the Nazi brutal-ity in order to make known the horrors of the Holocaust and to leave no roomfor revisionists or propaganda. By empowering the wartime photographers,he implored Western civilization to acknowledge the unparalleled atrocities.While on the set of Schindler’s List, I heard the haunting and horrific accountsof survivors, and I knew that no matter how exact the movie would be, I couldnever fully understand what they endured. But I thought maybe, just maybe,after hearing some of their stories, that I could do something to use that samedocumentarian approach to help empower them as well. So what started outas a camera technique, as a commitment to accuracy, to authenticity, to ac-knowledgment and deference to the vast scope of genocide we were consider-ing during the making of the film quickly progressed—to cameras,photography, videography, and documentary filmmaking in what would be-

come a steadfast and global commitment togenocide prevention.

I read an article in The New York Times a fewyears back about the private pain, psychologicaltoll, and ethical dilemmas that wartime photog-raphers have faced over the years. Bill Keller saidsomething particularly appropriate in the piece,and it resonates very much with my thoughtsabout these last 20 years. He said that wartimephotographers “cannot avert their eyes; they haveto let the images in, no matter how searing ordisturbing.” He explained that covering conflictrequires a kind of resignation to vulnerability.

I’d like to think the same is true of the womenand men who came forward to give testimonyand the interviewers, videographers, and staffersthemselves—that we are making ourselves vul-nerable to one another in the name of toleranceeducation. The survivors and witnesses of theHolocaust did not avert their eyes because theyknew that one day they could show us the im-portance of bearing witness. Here we are—20years after the start of the Shoah Foundation—doing more than I could have ever imaginedwith that simple notion of documentation, thatconcept of examining the historical record for thepurposes of remembering it and reflecting uponit so that with a camera and a clear mission ofgenocide prevention, we are both teaching toler-ance and inspiring the otherwise indifferent.

Camera-ReadyBy Steven SpielbergTwenty years later: The legacy of Schindler’s List

and the USC Shoah Foundation

PHOTO BY BRIA

N BOWEN SMITH, COURTESY O

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REAMWORKS STUDIO

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Edouard Bamporiki is an award-winning filmmaker, actor, andpoet. As a young Rwandan artist,he has received international at-tention for his stories of hope,unity, and reconciliation. His fea-ture debut in Lee Isaac Chung’sMunyurangabo screened at theCannes Film Festival. In 2008,he wrote, directed, starred in,and produced Long Coat, whichwon first prize in African film atthe Focus Future Film Festival inNew York. He is a founder of Artfor Peace Rwanda. Bamporiki is amember of Parliament in thechamber of deputies.

Writer-director Ted Braun’sfeature debut, Darfur Now, wonthe NAACP Image Award forBest Documentary of 2007, andwas chosen one of 2007’s top fivedocumentaries by the NationalBoard of Review. It also earnedthe International DocumentaryAssociation’s Emerging Film-maker of the Year award. In2008, Movie Maker Magazine

named him, along with ErrolMorris, Oliver Stone, and RobertRedford, one of 25 filmmakerswhose work has changed theworld. Braun is an associateprofessor of screenwriting atUSC’s School of Cinematic Arts.

Stacie Chaiken is founderof Witness and Responsibilityand has created performances in-volving conflict, the Middle East,and the Holocaust. This year, sheis serving as international cre-ative director of Kwibuka20, the20th-anniversary commemora-tion of the genocide againstTutsi in Rwanda.

Tim Cole teaches history atthe University of Bristol in theUnited Kingdom. His researchinterests are in Holocaust studiesand the social, cultural, and envi-ronmental histories of landscape.He is the author of Images of theHolocaust/Selling the Holocaust(1999), Holocaust City (2003),and Traces of the Holocaust (2011).He is coeditor of MilitarizedLandscapes (2010).

Antonio Damasio is UniversityProfessor, David Dornsife Profes-sor of Neuroscience, and Directorof the Brain and Creativity Insti-tute at USC; he is also an adjunctprofessor at the Salk Institutein La Jolla, Calif. Damasio hasmade seminal contributions tothe understanding of brain

processes underlying emotions,feelings, decision-making, andconsciousness. Damasio is amember of the Institute ofMedicine of the National Academyof Sciences and a Fellow of theAmerican Academy of Arts andSciences, the Bavarian Academyof Sciences, and the EuropeanAcademy of Sciences and Arts.

Esther Toporek Finder has taughtpsychology at Montgomery Col-lege in Maryland for more than20 years. She is the founder andpresident of Generations of theShoah—Nevada; former presi-dent of The Generation After inWashington, D.C.; and a mem-ber of the Coordinating Councilof Generations of the Shoah In-ternational. She was appointed by

the governor of Nevada to theAdvisory Council on EducationRelating to the Holocaust and ison the board of the HolocaustSurvivors Group of Southern Ne-vada. Finder was on the task forceto create a Holocaust, GenocideStudies, Human Rights andTolerance Center in Maryland.

Alberto Giordano is a geogra-pher, cartographer, and geo-graphic information scientist atTexas State University. His cur-rent research interests are in theapplication of the methods andtools of geographic informationscience to history and historicalgeography, historical cartography,genocide, and the Holocaust. Hehas worked on the policy aspectof geographic information, espe-cially on standardization issuesand the evaluation of employmentpolicies, and has written on tech-nological hazards and environ-mental justice.

PastForward brings together many voices around issues related to the educational and scholarly use of genocide eyewitness testimony. Whether survivors or their descendants, teachers or students, scholars, historians, or filmmakers, the variety of their experiences and opinions is a sample of the lively milieu of critical thought and discourse emerging around the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive.

Meet the authors of this issue of PastForward

page 16 Charting the World Through Testimony (left to right) Alberto Giordano, Anne Kelly Knowles, Tim Cole, and Paul B. Jaskot

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Contributors

Samuel Gustman is the Insti-tute’s chief technology officer. Heis responsible for the operations,preservation, and cataloging ofthe Institute’s Visual HistoryArchive. Gustman provides tech-nical leadership for the integra-tion of the Institute’s digitalarchives into USC’s collectionof electronic resources, ensuringits accessibility for academic andresearch communities at USCand around the world. His officeprovides technical support foruniversities and organizationsthat subscribe to the Institute’sVisual History Archive. He isalso an associate dean at USCLibraries and founder of theUSC Digital Repository.

Paul B. Jaskot is a professor ofart history at DePaul University.He is the author of The Architec-ture of Oppression: The SS, Forced

Labor and the Nazi MonumentalBuilding Economy, as well as nu-merous essays on the relation-ship between Nazi politics andcultural production. He is cur-rently the director of the Holo-caust Education FoundationSummer Institute.

Mukesh Kapila, CBE, is professorof Global Health and Humanitar-ian Affairs at the University ofManchester. He is also specialrepresentative of the Aegis Trust

for the prevention of crimesagainst humanity, and chair ofMinority Rights Group Interna-tional. Previously he was undersecretary general at the Interna-tional Federation of Red Cross.He has served the United Nationsas special adviser to the HighCommissioner for Human Rightsin Geneva; special adviser at theUN Mission in Afghanistan; and

resident and humanitariancoordinator for the Sudan. Hethen became a director at theWorld Health Organization. Heis the author of Against A Tide of Evil, a memoir of the Darfurgenocide.

As dean of the USC Dornsife Col-lege of Letters, Arts and Sciences,Steve Kay oversees the univer-sity’s largest and oldest school.He also holds faculty appoint-ments in molecular and compu-tational biology, as well as inneurology, physiology, and bio-physics at Keck School of Medi-cine of USC. One of the world’stop experts on genes and circa-dian rhythms, Kay has publishedmore than 200 papers and hasbeen cited in Science magazine’s“Breakthroughs of the Year”three times. He is also an electedmember of the National Academyof Sciences and a fellow of theAmerican Association for theAdvancement of Science.

Péter Krekó is director of PoliticalCapital, a policy research and con-sulting institute in Hungary. Hismain research interest is the socialdemand for radical-right move-ments and the social psychologyof conspiracy theories. As an as-sistant professor at Eötvös LorándUniversity, Krekó delivers lectureson social and political psychology.He is the author of numerousstudies and articles on the radical

right. He is co-chair of thePreventing Violent Extremismworking group of the EU Radicali-sation Awareness Network.

Anne Kelly Knowles is a historicalgeographer at Middlebury College.She is the author of Calvinists In-corporated: Welsh Immigrants onOhio’s Industrial Frontier (1997)and Mastering Iron: The Struggleto Modernize an American Indus-try. She edited Past Time, PastPlace: GIS for History (2002) andPlacing History: How Maps, Spa-tial Data, and GIS Are ChangingHistorical Scholarship (2008).

French journalist and filmmakerClaude Lanzmann is best knownfor his groundbreaking 1985 filmShoah. The nine-hour documen-tary about the Holocaust reliessolely on contemporary interviewshe conducted throughout Europe.Lanzmann returned to the subjectin 2013 with The Last of the Un-just, a documentary about the con-troversial Benjamin Murmelstein,a rabbi who was appointed by theNazis to the Jewish council thatoversaw life in the Theresienstadtghetto. He is chief editor of thejournal Les Temps Modernes and isa lecturer at the European Gradu-ate School in Switzerland.

Joshua Oppenheimer hasdocumented militias, deathsquads, and their victims for overa decade to explore the relation-ship between political violenceand the public imagination. Edu-cated at Harvard and Central StMartins, London, his award-win-ning films include The Globaliza-tion Tapes (2003, co-directed withChristine Cynn), The Entire His-tory of the Louisiana Purchase(1998, Gold Hugo, Chicago FilmFestival), These Places We’veLearned to Call Home (1996, GoldSpire, San Francisco Film Festi-val), and numerous shorts. Op-penheimer is Senior Researcheron the U.K. Arts and HumanitiesResearch Council’s Genocideand Genre project.

Joshua Oppenheimer, page 26

Spring 2014


Contributors

Todd Presner is professor ofGermanic Languages and Com-parative Literature at the Univer-sity of California, Los Angeles.He is the Sady and Ludwig KahnDirector of the UCLA Center forJewish Studies and is also thechair of the Digital HumanitiesProgram. His most recent booksare: Digital Humanities (MITPress, 2012), co-authored withAnne Burdick, Johanna Drucker,Peter Lunenfeld, and JeffreySchnapp; and HyperCities: ThickMapping in the Digital Humani-ties (Harvard University Press,2014), co-authored with DavidShepard and Yoh Kawano.

Anne-Marie Revcolevschigraduated from the Sorbonne.After a career in higher educa-tion, including serving as directorof international cooperation atthe French Ministry of Education,Research and Technology, shebecame director general of the

Foundation for the Memoryof the Shoah, the largest organi-zation of its kind in Europe. Shelaunched the Aladdin Project inMarch 2009. Today, this interna-tional NGO is a leader in raisingawareness of the Holocaust andcombating racism, anti-Semitism,and denial in the Muslim worldthrough extensive educationaland cultural programs.

With responsibility for oversightof the Institute’s day-to-day opera-tions, Kim Simon directs thedevelopment and implementationof all core mission activities, in-cluding the education program,research agenda, documentationactivity, public outreach, and ad-ministration. Simon acts as theInstitute’s program and projectmanager, leading senior staff insetting strategic priorities andgoals, analyzing program out-comes, developing implementa-

tion plans, and ensuringalignment with larger universityand college strategies. Simonjoined the Institute in 1994 tohelp coordinate efforts to collectinterviews with Holocaust sur-vivors and witnesses around theworld. She subsequently estab-lished the Institute’s Office ofGlobal Partnerships to create itsinternational program agenda,and oversaw its work in Europe,Australia, South Africa, and inNorth and South America.

Martin Šmok is the seniorinternational program consultantfor the Institute, where he hasworked since 1995. He has alsoworked on documentaries, in-cluding Among Blind Fools, a tril-ogy about the Working Group ofBratislava, a forgotten Jewishresistance cell led by Gisi Flesich-mann and Rabbi Michael Weiss-mandl; and Between a Star and aCrescent, a trilogy chronicling theinvolvement of CommunistCzechoslovakia in the MiddleEast. He has curated exhibitionsabout Communist propagandaand post–WWII Jewish life inCzechoslovakia, as well as au-thored several articles about theanti–Zionist show trials in whatwas once the Soviet Bloc.

Ervin Staub is a Hungarian childsurvivor of the Holocaust. He isprofessor emeritus and ground-ing director of the doctoral pro-gram in the psychology of peaceand violence at the University ofMassachusetts at Amherst, pastpresident of the InternationalSociety for Political Psychology,and of the Society for the Studyof Peace, Conflict, and Violence.His latest book is OvercomingEvil: Genocide, Violent Conflict andTerrorism. His projects rangefrom working with teachers andparents to promote altruism inchildren, to the training of activebystanders in schools, to semi-nars/trainings and educationalradio projects in Rwanda, Bu-rundi, and the Congo.

Andrea Szőnyi is senior interna-tional training consultant and re-gional representative in Hungaryfor the USC Shoah Foundation.She is also the director of ZachorFoundation for Social Remem-

brance, a nonprofit educationalinstitution working in Holocaustand human rights education inHungary. Szőnyi graduated fromEötvös Loránd University, Bu-dapest, with degrees in Englishand Russian languages and litera-ture. She also received a degreein cultural management. Szőnyiworked for years as a high schoolteacher. She is a Holocaust Edu-cation Fellow of the Imperial WarMuseum in London.

Xu Xin, professor and dean ofthe Glazer Institute for Jewishand Israel Studies in the Depart-ment of Philosophy and ReligiousStudies at Nanjing University, isalso editor-in-chief and a majorcontributor of the Chinese editionof Encyclopedia Judaica. Heteaches Jewish history, Jewishculture, and Holocaust studies,and has created graduate-levelprograms on Jewish culture. Heis author of Anti-Semitism: Howand Why; The Jews of Kaifeng,China: History, Culture, andReligion; and A History of JewishCulture. In 2003, he was awardedan honorary doctorate by Bar-IlanUniversity in recognition of theimportant work he has done onresearch of the Jewish peoplein China.

Zhu Chengshan is director ofthe Nanjing Massacre MemorialHall and a scholar of Chinese his-tory, museum studies, and peacebuilding. Zhu has held leadershippositions at many research insti-tutions, including the NanjingInternational Peace Research In-stitute, the Chinese Associationof Museums, the Historical Soci-ety of the Nanjing Massacre, Chi-nese Writers Association, and theHistorical Society of the ChinesePeople’s War Against JapaneseInvasion. He is a master advisorat Nanjing Normal University andthe chief editor of Japanese Inva-sion of China History Research.

page 35 Andrea Szőnyi, Martin Šmok

Expanding the VisionBy Stephen D. SmithAs the Institute turns 20, the Visual History Archive

is reaching even more people.


It has been 20 years since the first testimonies in the USC Shoah Foun-dation Visual History Archive were taken. All that was known then was theneed to collect, because time was running short to preserve the story of thewitnesses to the Holocaust. But even then, there was a sense of a long-termeducational purpose. On Oscar night 1994, Steven Spielberg urged the worldto “not allow the Holocaust to remain a footnote in history. Please teach thisin your schools. There are 350,000 experts who just want to be useful withthe remainder of their lives. Please listen to the words, the echoes, and the

ghosts, and please teach this in your schools.”Twenty years on, that vision is at the heart of the mission of

the USC Shoah Foundation. The Visual History Archive is at aplace of learning at the University of Southern California, sharedwith other institutions of learning around the world, and avail-able to every classroom with a connection to the Internet.

In this edition of PastForward, we hear from users of the Vi-sual History Archive spanning the globe, from high schoolteachers to professors, historians to neuroscientists, filmmakersto politicians. As the Institute passes the landmark of its firstgeneration, we look to the future eagerly, knowing that we haveundertaken a millennial task to ensure that the meaning of theVisual History Archive is slowly and carefully shared for manygenerations to come. Buried deep in its tens of thousands of

hours of testimony are still unforeseen places of knowledge and understandingwe are yet to understand.

We live in a time of rapidly advancing technology, which provides power to ourefforts. Testimonies in the digital classroom using our IWitness platform reachvast numbers of younger learners whose whole style of learning is far from text-book rote. Today, inquiry-led, project-based, competency-centered learning isdriven increasingly by digital platforms. We cannot expect the next generation tocome to us. We have to find them wherever they are in their digital world.

So too in higher education, the technological landscape has completelychanged in 20 years. Harnessing the power of technology to bring together dig-ital humanities with social sciences and hard sciences also provides a place ofinterdisciplinary connection through the big data. At a recent seminar at theUSC Shoah Foundation, geographer Tim Cole (see page 16) stated, “We thoughtwe were going to use the index to help illustrate what we know about places.We quickly discovered that testimony does not confirm what we know aboutplaces—it changes what we know.” To get at that new knowledge will take ge-ographers, mathematicians, social scientists, and historians working together.

In the coming years, as testimony from theNanjing massacre, the Armenian genocide, andthe genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda aremade available through the Institute’s VisualHistory Archive, we will not only enrich ourknowledge but also enhance our research andeducational outreach.

To mark our 20th year we are particularlypleased to announce the launch of the USCShoah Foundation's Center for Advanced Geno-cide Research. This interdisciplinary center, di-rected by professor Wolf Gruner, will provide aplace for scholarship and deep research in whichtestimony will provide a vital research resourcefor scholars at USC and around the world.

As the name of this digest implies, we arerooted in the past, but are also looking to thefuture. Here are some of the ways the Instituteis moving forward:

• The next 20 years will bring many more tes-timonies of the Holocaust to the Visual His-tory Archive, as well as many testimoniesfrom those who have suffered genocide andviolent societies around the world.

• As we expand our reach, there is a commu-nity of people growing around the VisualHistory Archive, who will be able to interactwith one another.

• Every computer and mobile device con-nected to the Internet will become a windowof learning to the Visual History Archive.

• Families will discover roots, and researcherswill share their findings.

• Students in Africa, Asia, and in the Muslimcountries of the Middle East will watch tes-timony and be able to learn and share.

• We will ask those who are experiencing vio-lent conflict to trust us with their voice as theconflicts are happening.

• Policymakers, lawmakers, and advocates forhumanity will use the testimonies for goodin our world.

Little by little, we are changing the worldthrough testimony. One voice at a time.

The leadership and staff of USC Shoah Foun-dation would like to thank everyone who hasgiven testimony and those of you who have giventime to volunteer or teach from the Visual His-tory Archive. This Institute only exists becausemany thousands of people have been preparedto share a part of themselves for the benefit ofthe wider community. For that we—and futuregenerations to come—are truly grateful.

PastForward Executive Director’s LetterPHOTO B

Y KIM

FOX


Nearly 52,000 survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust and othergenocides, from 58 countries and in 34 languages, have given theirtestimonies to the Institute. The Visual History Archive is filledwith more than 107,000 hours of unique life stories. It wouldtake more than 12 years to watch every person’s testimony, and it would be impossible to share all their stories in PastForward. Here is a glimpse from the Visual History Archive into the life of Holocaust survivor Roman Kent.

Voices from the Visual History Archive

Roman KentBorn April 18, 1929, Lódz, PolandInterviewed April 29, 1996, New York, N.Y.

Roman Kent's testimony can be viewed online at: vhaonline.usc.edu

oman Kent is a highly sought-afterand influential member of the sur-vivor community. He has for yearsserved on the board of the Claims

Conference, is a member of the United StatesHolocaust Memorial Council, is chairman ofthe American Gathering of Jewish HolocaustSurvivors & Their Descendants, and holdsmany other distinguished positions.

One might wonder, then, why, with such so-phisticated insights into the complexity of theHolocaust and its consequences, that hechooses in his testimony in the Visual HistoryArchive to focus on one of the simplest of allrelationships: his pet. It is because of his dog,Lala, that Kent sometimes wishes people weremore like animals.

He and his family, from Lódz, Poland, werehunted and homeless during World War II.They worked at forced labor, were plagued byillness and tormented by hunger, and wereabandoned by neighbors. Only Lala seemed toshow them complete loyalty, and reminded theyoung boy that there was still love in a worldthat had gone mad. It is a message that Kent

carried with him after the war. Although her presence in Kent’s life was

brief, Lala has become a way to connect withyoung people learning about the Holocaust.Because it is easier for a child to relate to losinga dog than to being separated from his or herfamily or living in a concentration camp, an ac-tivity that focused on Kent and Lala has beenthe most popular on the Institute’s IWitnesswebsite for secondary-school students. Kentalso wrote a book, My Dog Lala, in 2008 as away to reach even more young people.

Before the war broke out, Kent (born RomanKniker) lived a typical, carefree life in Lódz. TheKnikers were fairly rich, Kent said in the VisualHistory Archive testimony he gave in 1996. Hisfather, Emanuel, often treated the boys to horse-back riding. Aunts, uncles, and cousins wouldcome to the Kniker house to celebrate Passover,Hanukkah, and other Jewish holidays, whenKent and his siblings would sing the traditionalsongs they had learned in school.

The field behind his father’s textile factoryhosted endless games of soccer, basketball, andvolleyball, which Kent played with his younger

brother, Leon, and his friends from the Jewishschool he attended dutifully six days a week. Hismother, Sonia, stayed home and took care of him,Leon, and their older sisters, Dasza and Renia.

Into this happy world came the perfect addi-tion: a small dog named for the Polish word fordoll. Lala quickly became part of the family, andthe children doted upon her.

“She was a beautiful dog,” Kent says.The family was at their summer villa in the

Polish countryside when war broke out.It was exciting at first. Since schools had

been closed, the Knikers stayed at the villa.When a neighbor alerted them that the Ger-mans were close by, they returned to theirapartment in Lódz.

The Knikers were forced to leave so quicklythat they decided that Lala would stay with thesuperintendent of the villa. But while the fam-ily was at the train station, Lala appeared. Thechildren were happy, and they took her back toLódz with them.

Life in their hometown had changed soquickly. Restrictions against Jews were in full ef-fect. The family had to wear Stars of David on

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their clothes. They were not allowed out at night.Emanuel lost his job as head of the factory.

One day, they found that their apartment hadbeen closed up and taken over by a local Ger-man. The Knikers moved into an empty roomin their factory. They had nothing, but they stillhad one another and their dog with them.

But by the end of 1939, all the Jews in the cityhad been ordered to move into the Lódz ghetto.The Knikers again had to say goodbye to Lala,who had just given birth to a litter. Kent and hissiblings were too young to understand whatwas happening, but they worried about Lala.

Their first night in their new home—oneroom and a kitchen for the six of them—theKnikers were awakened by scratching at the door.

It was Lala.“How she found us, God only knows,” Kent

says. “Her golden hair was covered with mud,sleet, and snow. She was tired, but the momentshe saw us, she started licking our hands, ourfaces, her tail was wiggling, and of course wewere happy.”

In the morning, Lala left—to return to herpuppies at the factory. But each night, she

would arrive at the Knikers’ apartment, andeach morning she would go back to the factory.

After the puppies were old enough, Lalastayed with family in the ghetto, but shortlythereafter, the Germans gave an order that alldogs must be turned over to them.

“Since all ‘Jewish’ dogs in the ghetto wereregistered, there was no way for us to avoid thisbecause noncompliance meant death to theowner,” Kent says.

The family was forced to hand over the dogto the authorities. She knew something strangewas happening because she trembled andwhined, but there was no choice. They neversaw their beloved pet again.

Her disappearance serves to highlight foryounger students just how bleak life was in theghetto.

“Slowly the screw tightened,” Kent says. “Itwent from bad to worse. From day to day youcould see the starvation. You could see the deadand dying in the streets. There weren’t enoughpeople to bury the dead.”

But the young Kent remained defiant.Forced to sew military garments for German

soldiers, he and others refused to work quickly.It was, he says, an act of resistance that was amore effective weapon than brandishing a gun.

His father died in 1943 of malnutrition and ul-cers. A year later, when the ghetto was liquidated,Kent, his mother, and siblings were taken by cattlecar to Auschwitz. The first thing he rememberedupon his arrival were the deafening sounds ofcrying and screaming. Once off the train, he wit-nessed savage murders being committed withchilling nonchalance. Soon, he and his brotherwere separated from their mother and sisters andsent to a different part of the camp. It was farworse than anything he had seen in the ghetto.

“It was the first time I encountered the vi-cious brutality,” he says.

Kent explains that it is impossible for thosewho were not there to begin to imagine the un-believable, horrific scene.

“If Shakespeare were alive, he wouldn’t beable to describe a day at Auschwitz,” he says.“I don’t think anyone—regardless of howmany degrees he has, how many books hestudied—can understand the torment of evenone hour at Auschwitz.”

Only after their liberation, which came dur-ing a forced march from the Flossenberg con-centration camp to Dachau in 1945, were thebrothers able to reunite with their sisters,Dasza and Renia.

Renia told them that their mother had beensick and been sent to a hospital. Soon there-after the Germans murdered all of the patients.Dasza was very ill and died in Sweden a fewmonths after liberation.

Kent immigrated to the United States, at-tended college, and became a successful busi-nessman and the leader of many Holocaust-remembrance organizations. He married, hadtwo children, and built a new life. He prospered.

Instead of making him bitter, Kent’s past be-came a reminder to be kind and helpful to oth-ers. He continues to teach children about thebeautiful golden-haired dog.

“No barbed wire, no guns stopped this littledog from loving us, coming to us, and thengoing back to her own children,” he says. “Loveis stronger than hate!”

Kent strongly advocates the importance ofeducation, teaching young students the lessonsto be learned from the Holocaust. He believesthat future generations must be made aware ofwhat transpired during this horrendous occur-rence in our history, to help ensure that suchan unspeakable event will never happen again.Education is also a valuable tool to accentuatethe meaning of tolerance.

(Clockwise from left) Kent with Liv Ullmann, narrator of the documentary Children of theHolocaust; Kent shortly after arrival to the U.S., 1946; Prewarfamily portrait, Kent (second from left); “The Happy Boys” orchestra in Cham, Germany,Kent (second from left).


The Legacy of testimony

utive, legislative, and judiciary branches of gov-ernment. What better way to teach studentsabout the rights, freedoms, and responsibilitiesof living in a democracy than to contrast demo-cratic values with those of the Nazis?

The Holocaust has profound and particularpower for those of us who grew up in itsshadow, but that is where its particularity ends.As much as it affects us as Jews, it is not a Jew-ish story; it is a human experience. When Iteach psychology classes, concepts like preju-dice and discrimination are intricately linked.I also use the Shoah to demonstrate the powerof the situation, conformity, obedience, groupthink, diffusion of responsibility, de-individu-ation, and more. That was true of people in the1940s and will be true for us in 2040 and be-yond. What may improve is how we under-stand and deal with our human frailties.

As part of a technologically connected second-generation community, we appreciate the ad-vances made by the USC Shoah Foundation,which have made it possible for students aroundthe world to have a dynamic and personal rela-tionship with the survivors. I was particularlydelighted to see Estelle Laughlin, one of the in-dividuals I interviewed, featured in the award-winning student film Beanstar. This short film,a true story of a young woman who, as a Mexi-can, personally experienced stereotyping and dis-crimination, is a perfect example of how survivortestimony can resonate with students today.

I conducted more than 100 interviews in theBaltimore-Washington, D.C., area for the VisualHistory Archive, which afforded me a uniqueopportunity to meet an unusual cross sectionof witnesses. To be sure I spoke with survivors,refugees, and partisans. I also spoke with peo-ple who worked the Nuremberg trials, and evenone of the U.S. government’s most successfulspies. The wonder of the Visual History Archiveis in the breadth of experiences that, when per-manently documented, will help us understandthe scope and complexity of the Shoah.

At times, life is more dramatic than fiction orany Hollywood script. During his training, therefugee-turned-spy I interviewed was specifi-cally told not to impersonate a German soldier,so he did not: He impersonated a German offi-cer. He collected intelligence on transports ofmen and matériel through the Brenner Pass.Because he relayed that information to the Al-lied command, they were able to destroy dozensof military trains, thus shortening the war inEurope. How many more people—prisoners,soldiers on both sides, and civilians—wouldhave died without one man’s intervention?

Therein lies the secret of the Visual History

THE USC SHOAH FOUNDATION’S Visual HistoryArchive is a resource of tremendous depth andscope, wherein the firsthand accounts of the sur-vivors and witnesses allow us to gaze into the bot-tomless evil that was the Holocaust. Conversely,we can also appreciate, through their testi-monies, the strength of the human spirit. Gen-erations to come will be able not only to hear theauthentic voices of those who were there but alsoto see the emotions in the facial expressions ofthese remarkable people, and meet their families.

As the daughter of two Auschwitz-Birkenausurvivors, the value of first-person narratives isclose to me. My mother died in 1970 at the ageof 47. At that time, families did not have thetechnology to save oral histories that we havetoday. I was young and could not have realizedthat the window of opportunity to preserve herstory was so limited. All I have of my mother’shistory are some anecdotal pieces. I do not even

have her voice recorded. One of the reasons I volunteered and worked so dili-gently to interview as many people as I could with the Shoah Foundation wasso that other families could preserve not only the story but also the voice oftheir beloved parents.

My father’s testimony is recorded, and for our family this is a gift. Prisoner145183 will be known to future generations by his name, Harry Toporek, notby the number on his arm. We have a permanent record captured when hewas in sound health. He is no longer capable of doing an interview, so I trulyappreciate that Steven Spielberg made it possible to preserve his preciouslegacy in a timely way.

As well as being a child of survivors, I am an educator, and I know you cannotreach students if they do not see the relevance of the subject. That is why it iscrucial that lessons of the Shoah resonate with students today and in the future.This is not just history, nor is it about our generation only. Its implicationsreach into how we live now and will for generations to come. For this to be ef-fective, the Holocaust can and should be taught in multiple disciplines. The Vi-sual History Archive can help students see what happens under a repressivedictatorship when there is no balance of power and no freedom of the press orpersonal expression. There are reasons why free countries have separate exec-

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The Next GenerationBy Esther Toporek FinderSecond- and third-generation survivors embrace

the message of education and remembrance

Family portrait (left to right) mother Faye,

Esther, brother Jack, father Harry, Chicago, 1953.

Esther Toporek Finder has taught psychology at

Montgomery College in Maryland for more than

20 years. For a full biography, see page 4.


testimony Around the World

Archive. Each story is individual and carries itsown weight and complexity. I was moved whena child survivor told me of his education duringWorld War II. The very thought of educatingchildren in his ghetto, which was an offensethat carried a death sentence, was an act of re-sistance and bravery as well as an act of hope.Hearing this made me appreciate our thirst forknowledge and the tenacity of the humanspirit. It is that which drives me to teach andto tell this story, as there is much to learn fromthose who gave their testimony. I was privi-leged to interview a Polish survivor who hidwith her infant son in a residence run byCatholics. While there, she was asked to pro-vide breast milk for an orphaned baby girl—aJewish woman hiding in a monastery savingthe life of a Christian child.

Children and grandchildren of survivors havestarted to use their loved one’s testimony intheir own public presentations in schools. Thatmulti-generational perspective on the Holocaustand its lasting legacy provides momentum andrelevance as never before. These testimonieswill live beyond us and touch the future.

Twenty years after the Institute’s founding,my heartfelt thanks to Steven Spielberg, whomade it possible for my father to tell his story,and for me to be touched by so many lives, andproud, as a part of the second generation, to bea part of something that will be there for manygenerations to come.

To watch the film Beanstar by Mariana Aguilar,that features a testimony conducted by EstherToporek Finder, visit: http://sfi.usc.edu/beanstar

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HOLOCAUST EDUCATION IS UNIQUELY situatedin China, a country without an anti-Semitic tra-dition, and thousands of miles from where theHolocaust happened. The paucity of direct con-tact with Jews throughout Chinese history hasimpeded early awareness of the Holocaust, butthe last 20 years have seen great progress with

Holocaust education programs there. But how and why?Holocaust education in China is closely linked to Judaic studies. With the ad-

vancement of Judaic studies, many scholars realized that the Holocaust is an issuedirectly linked with the Jewish people since World War II. Judaic studies led tothe study of anti-Semitism. The study of anti-Semitism led to Holocaust studies.With the deepening of Judaic studies, Holocaust education deepened, too.

A marked change occurred in the 1980s with the open-door policy and eco-nomic reform in China. Jewish studies, which started in the late 1980s and early1990s in China, accelerated after diplomatic relations were established between

China and Israel in 1992. Jewish studies be-came popular. In addition to conferences, ex-hibitions, and courses, many books andarticles on various Jewish and Israeli subjectsappeared in Chinese. Holocaust studies alsoappeared in Chinese academic circles. Holo-caust education appears in Chinese collegeeducation with the deepening awareness that“the Holocaust fundamentally challengedthe foundations of civilization, and the un-precedented character of the Holocaust willalways hold universal meaning,” as stated inthe Stockholm declaration of 2000.

Under the leadership of the Glazer Institutefor Jewish and Israel Studies at Nanjing Uni-versity, a project on “learning Jewish culture”was launched in 1990 to promote the study ofJewish subjects among Chinese college stu-dents. At the outset, the Holocaust was onlya small part of the regular courses on Jewish

Xu Xin is professor and dean of the Glazer

Institute for Jewish and Israel Studies in the

Department of Philosophy and Religious Stud-

ies at Nanjing University. For a full biography,

see page 6.

Teaching theHolocaust in ChinaBy Xu XinChinese scholars link Judaic studies and

Holocaust studies over 20 years

Xu Xin teaches Judaic studies and Holocauststudies in China.

culture, but students’ interest in learning moreabout the Holocaust grew. In 2000, the Institutestarted to offer its students an entire course onthe Holocaust, titled TheHolocaust throughVideos.

In order to introduce Holocaust educationthroughout China, a teacher’s training seminarwas held at Nanjing University in 2005, co-spon-sored by the Task Force for International Coop-eration on Holocaust Education, Remembranceand Research, now known as International Holo-caust Remembrance Alliance; Fondation pour laMemoire de la Shoah; London Jewish CulturalCentre; and the Glazer Institute. As Chinesescholars learned about the Holocaust and howto teach it, they also shared with the non-Chineseparticipants their expertise on the Nanjing mas-sacre. Parallels were drawn between the twoatrocities. The seminar elicited great attentionfrom the Chinese side and promoted education,remembrance, and research about the Holocaustin colleges throughout China. Participantslearned at the seminar not only the facts but alsothe skills necessary to disseminate their knowl-edge at their universities. To run a seminar onthe Holocaust with the background of the Nan-

jing massacre proved to be effective and usefulto present reliable, unprejudiced, and accurateknowledge of the Holocaust to Chinese scholarswho are either teaching courses on world historyor Western civilization at Chinese universitiesand colleges, or doing research. Moreover, it pro-vides a rare and unique opportunity for Chinesescholars to learn about the Holocaust and suffer-ings of the Jewish people during World War IIin a systematic way without going abroad, and toteach Holocaust-related courses in China.

It is not accurate to say that interest in Holo-caust studies in China stems from the Chinese’own attempt to highlight their own sufferings.However, Holocaust studies certainly helps theChinese to be more aware of their own suffer-ings and to learn different ways to look intoand remember the Nanjing massacre, in par-ticular, and persecutions of the Chinese duringWorld War II, in general. The recent coopera-

tion between the USC Shoah Foundation andthe Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall in collect-ing testimonies of survivors and witnesses ofthe Nanjing massacre is but a good example.

Historically speaking, written records play animportant role in the development of civilization.Nevertheless, with the development of moderntechnology, written records seem not enough tocontain history. Audio-visual records become anew, powerful means for recording history, asthey keep both sound and images. For instance,audio-visual testimonies of the Holocaust andother genocides give a voice to the survivors andother witnesses, allowing them to speak directlyabout their personal experiences. The majorityof Chinese have almost no chance to meet inperson the survivors or witnesses of the Holo-caust. The Visual History Archive at USC ShoahFoundation, when available, will create a chancefor the Chinese population to “see” those people

and listen to their experiences directly. Holocaust studies also highlights human

rights issues in China. What Hitler did is con-sidered a crime against humanity. It raises anumber of questions concerning humanity:How could a group of human beings committhese crimes against another group of humanbeings? Why did the rest of the world stand byin silence when the Holocaust took place? Whatis human nature? And how did the the preser-vation of human rights disappear during WorldWar II? Those questions were raised and dis-cussed in the Holocaust courses. The study ofthe Holocaust obviously helps to encouragemore human rights discussions among Chinese.

Holocaust studies also provides useful lessonsfor Chinese to combat the denial of the Nanjingmassacre. As with Holocaust denial in the West,some Japanese historians attack the authenticityand objectivity of evidence and testimony regard-ing the historic events. It is also hoped that ex-amination of an outside perspective can helpthose nations directly affected by the Holocaustlearn to better understand their own history.

The Glazer Institute, as a partner of this tes-timony program, is pleased to have the oppor-tunity to work with both the USC ShoahFoundation and the Nanjing Massacre Memo-rial Hall. Twenty years after the creation of theShoah Foundation, the partnership to shareeyewitness testimony is a significant contribu-tion to knowledge and education.

Connecting with ChinaBy Zhu Chengshan, director of Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall

On Dec. 13, 1937, the Japanese army captured what was then China’s capital city, Nanjing,where they killed as many as 300,000 civilians and numerous unarmed Chinese soldiersover the course of two months.

For a long time, the domestic and international study of the Nanjing massacre mainly focusedon the study of literature; however, the study of the oral history of the Nanjing massacreneeds to be further improved. We have come to realize that through our international collabo-ration with the USC Shoah Foundation, not only will the horizon of Nanjing massacre re-search be broadened, thus making the study more diverse and multidimensional, but it willalso complement the macrostudy through case studies aimed at revealing the historic factfrom the microlevel. By doing so, we could gain a concrete, vivid, and rich historical cognitionto reveal and restore history objectively and truthfully.“In the meantime, we have been paying attention to related historical cases in other parts

of the world. For instance, the ‘Exhibition of Holocaust in Auschwitz Concentration Camp,’currently taking place at the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall, will promote the historical

education about the Holocaust in China.In recent years, we have also visited me-morial and research institutes in placeslike Rwanda and South Africa. We believewe could have additional conversationsin these fields in the future as well. Wehope that we can together contribute tothe cause of peace of mankind.

“Holocaust studies also highlights human rights issues in China. WhatHitler did is considered a crime against humanity. It raises a number ofquestions concerning humanity: How could a group of human beings commit these crimes against another group of human beings?”


Guixiang Chen, a survivor of the Nanjing massacreof 1937, with Ana Lee, a USC doctoral student whoassisted during the interview filming.

To view testimonies from the Nanjing Massacrecollection visit: vhaonline.usc.edu

Voice in the DarknessExcerpted from an interview conducted by Stephen D. SmithEdouard Bamporiki uses poetry to promote art for peace

Let me come crow the story of Rwanda.I witnessed bad times,I traveled to many countries,And in each I askedWhere the tragedy that decimatesThe Rwandese came from.– “A Cock Crows in Rwanda” by Edouard Bamporiki

AS A FILMMAKER, WRITER, POET, and member of the Rwandan Parliament,Edouard Bamporiki knows the importance of communication.

But when it came time for him to talk about his experience as a Hutu childwatching the genocide unfold in his own town, Bamporiki was unable tospeak. He is part of a generation that saw what happened, was persuaded bythe ideology of hatred, and now must find the courage to overcome the devas-tating legacy of genocide for all Rwandans.

It was at the commemoration ceremony in 2006 in Kigali that Bamporikifound his voice in public. He had been invited to recite some of his poetry, butthe man who preceded him to the microphone spoke so powerfully of his ex-perience as a Tutsi survivor of the genocide that Bamporiki felt a poem wasno longer adequate. He needed to do more.

“I was there thinking about the testimony and how that guy was wounded;they called me to give the poetry, and for sure I wasn’t ready,” Bamporiki recalls.“I stayed in front of the microphone, and then I said, ‘I am not ready to give apoem, but I am ready to give testimony because I also have a testimony.’ Theysaid to me that I should go ahead: ‘Tell us your story.’ ”

Then those that destroy my nationWill be forgotten in RwandaUnless I crow about them,So that we can remember their mistakes,So that future generations will not poke me with their fingers.

Now 30, he was only 11 during the genocide that tore through hiscountry, and the violence he saw confused him. He didn’t understandwhy his friends and teachers were being brutally murdered.

“In April 1994, I was in the hospital,” he says. “I was sick. I saw peoplekilling others. … I could see everything. I asked my mum, ‘Why are thesepeople killing others?’ It’s not easy to see people killing people in front ofyou. It was a bad image. And my mum kept silent for two, three, four days.”

Bamporiki does not consider himself a survivor of the genocide, as he is a Hutu, the ethnic group that perpetrated genocide against the Tutsi. But

he does consider himself a witness able to offera unique and honest perspective on what hap-pened during the 100 days of killing.

“Tutsi were not [involved] in the preparationof genocide,” he says. “… [When the genocide]started, they were in the panic zone. TheHutu—including me—were in the free zone.… When you’re in a panic zone, it’s not easy foryou to figure out what is going to happen. Afterthe genocide, those survivors were missingpeople, [and] having trauma.”

He believes that although the Hutu live withshame, it is all the more important to speak,because shame will not bring healing to eitherside. That, he believes, only happens when thetruth is told by everyone.

Even so, Bamporiki didn’t know if he had theright to tell his story during the 2006 genocidecommemoration.

“To be honest, before 2006, I did not believe aHutu could stand up during the genocide com-memoration and give testimony,” he says. “I washappy when my message was accepted, and I wascomforted, which gave me courage to go on. Fel-low youth started coming, saying the truth I waspromoting across the ethnic divide was crucial.”

The Poetry of testimony


Let us remember all of usOur history.You people, you quarreled.Most of you, you fled the country.Some of you, you stayed in Rwanda,And you did not like what you found.I crow to wake you up,But you stay in your beds,And I wonder what keeps you from me,And I feel sorrowful.

As a young politician, Bamporiki says his goalis to use the platform he has been given to spreadmessages of peace. Recently, he spoke in the vil-lage where he grew up—where, not too long ago,leaders in his position used their power to en-courage hatred and division among the people.

“It’s the same microphone, but what we aresaying is different,” Bamporiki says. “I amusing the same microphone as a politician totell you to love your neighbors.”

Even more powerful than a politician, how-ever, is an artist, he says. Art can gain people’strust and promote peace and tolerance indi-rectly when audiences are hesitant or skeptical.Arts “move hate,” Bamporiki says.

“I believe as artists, it is our task to give the goodmessage of peace as a way of teaching our soci-ety,” he says. “Art is a good way to attract people.”

No matter what, survivors of genocide needto speak out about their experiences, he says.Their testimony will create a permanent recordof what happened so that the genocide is re-membered accurately years from now. Preserv-ing testimonies will help younger generationslearn from the mistakes of their elders and notbecome perpetrators themselves.

“If there is no testimony, it’s like someonewho is old but who doesn’t know where hecomes from,” Bamporiki says. “If you want toprevent the genocide, you have to tell peoplewhat happened.”

A nation clothed in forest,You put yourself together.You prayed asking GodWhy you must stay abroadEven though you had RwandaAs your home.

To view Edouard Bamporiki's testimony visit: http://www.youtube.com/user/USCShoahFoundation

Edouard Bamporiki is an award-winning film-

maker, actor, and poet. As a young Rwandan

artist, he has received international attention

for his stories of hope, unity, and reconciliation.

For a full biography, see page 4.

MOST OF THE TIME WHEN we speak of the ethicaldimensions of video testimony of the Holocaust,we refer to the viewer’s “duty to listen and to re-store a dialogue.”1 By this, it is understood thatgenocide victims who give testimony have beendenied their humanity, and that isolation contin-

ues when their story is not heard. Video testimonies bind the testifier to theviewer in an ethical relationship that demands the viewer listen and understandwhat the survivor has shared. This is the ethical responsibility of the listener,who, in turn, becomes a secondary witness to the survivor’s story, and who isobliged to carry the message forward into the world.

Our research team wondered whether in the face of the USC Shoah Founda-tion’s Visual History Archive, which contains nearly 52,000 testimonies, an eth-ical relationship could be formed between an individual and the archive as awhole. To answer such a question, we had to investigate the technologies thatmade the Visual History Archive possible in the first place. In other words, howcan an information system or a database be “ethical”? That’s the question—atonce seemingly simple and deeply fraught—that my research team in the DigitalHumanities program at UCLA has been struggling to answer during the pasttwo years. Our research team brings together the methodological insights of com-puter science, particularly data analysis and data visualization, with the historyof the Holocaust, eyewitness testimony, and the ethical imperatives of listening.

In fact, how does one watch 52,000 videos and more than 100,000 hours ofwitness testimony? The Visual History Archive’s scope—its sheer scale meas-ured in terms of hours of testimony—is not readily comprehensible. To makethe testimonies accessible to users, the Visual History Archive requires a data-base and an information-management system to organize, categorize, and en-able searches of the testimonies based on a series of parameters. This, in turn,allows individuals to engage with discrete pieces of the Visual History Archiverather than with its entirety. Our project seeks an ethical approach to looking atthe Visual History Archive as a whole. We believe that by investigating the dataand the systems that structure user interactions with the testimonies, we willbe able to build ethical modes of computation in terms of digital interfaces, data-bases, metadata, and information systems.

While the media specificity of the first generation of Holocaust testimony hasbeen discussed at great length—ranging from David Boder’s wire recordings inDP camps and cassette tape to audio-visual documentation—there is no litera-ture on the digitization of the Holocaust archive and its transformation into aninformation system. With regard to the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History

Todd Presner is professor of Germanic Languages,

Comparative Literature, and Jewish Studies at

the University of California, Los Angeles. For a

full biography, see page 6.

The Ethics of the AlgorithmBy Todd PresnerClose and distant readings of the USC Shoah

Foundation's Visual History Archive

Connecting with testimony

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F TODD PRESNER


Archive, this is particularly noteworthy becausethe underlying information architecture makesthe testimonies searchable and therefore acces-sible in a way that would be impossible withoutit. This architecture consists of several compo-nents. First, there is the interface itself, whichruns in a Web browser, allowing a user to typein keywords, names, and other search terms; be-hind that is a relational and structured querylanguage database (SQL database, for short) inwhich metadata are organized into tables,records, and fields. All of these data were in-putted after the videos themselves were indexedwith keywords based on standards and protocolsdeveloped for the construction, formatting, andmanagement of a monolingual, controlled vo-cabulary (the thesaurus) to achieve consistencyin the description of the content. Beyond this,we have the hardware, such as the archiveservers and storage servers, where the videos arestored in digital formats for streaming in a videoplayer. In fact, from 1996 to 2002, 11 patentswere filed by inventor Samuel Gustman and theSurvivors of the Shoah Visual History Founda-tion, the assignee, for the Visual History Archiveinformation architecture, which includes thesystem for cataloguing multimedia data and thedevelopment of the digital library system itself.

To support our research, the USC Shoah Foun-dation graciously provided our research teamwith a copy of the entire database of metadata re-lated to the testimonies—a database of more than6 million tables, primarily the indexing terms as-sociated with one-minute segments of testimony.With regard to the thesaurus of indexing terms,we are interested in how the main relationships(inheritance, whole/part, and associative) repre-sent the experiences described in the testimonies,and whether there are limits to its effectiveness.

To that end, our research team is also devel-oping ways to deepen the indexing system be-yond manifest content (what concretely is saidin the testimonies in terms of events, people,and places), to include ways to find more sub-jective experiences and memories that may beconnected to the performative, memorial, andfigural dimensions of testimony. Among otherthings, this means recognizing the importanceof tone and voice, of questioning and doubt, ofthe expressiveness of the face, silences, emo-tional realities, and larger narrative structures,tropes, and communities of experience.

Yet, perhaps paradoxically, the goal of infor-mation architecture is to be objective, to disam-biguate the testimonial narratives and torender them operational within the logic ofcomputational processing, to produce an in-dexing system that is complete and a digital

library system that is modular and extensible(to accommodate any kind of testimony or ex-perience). As exciting as this is from an infor-mation studies perspective, as well as from acomparative genocide studies perspective, Iwonder how we might, in the process, rethinkthe very genre of the database as a representa-tional form vis-à-vis the specific experiences ofbearing witness, testifying, surviving, and nar-rating. How might the database reflect thefragility of life, the uncertainty, ambiguity, andfiguration of narrative? How might it preservethe “hauntedness” that informs so much of thetestimony? In other words, how might a data-base be open to the haunt of the past, the traceof the unknown, the spectral quality of the in-determinate, and, simultaneously, be orientedto the uncertainty of the future, and the possi-bility of the unknown.2

To do so, we are imagining how fluid or dif-ferential data ontologies might work by allowingmultiple thesauruses, which recognize a rangeof knowledge models and standards. For exam-ple, what if verbs and adjectives that connectedaction and agent, experience and context weregiven more weight than hierarchies of nounsprimarily in associative relationships? How canwe help listeners find and contemplate silences,gaps, stuttering, and emotional realities at theheart of the testimonies? And what if a moreparticipatory architecture allowed for other lis-

teners to create tags that could responsibly pro-liferate indexing categories and keywords asso-ciated with the segments of testimonies?

Such a structure of saying and unsaying thedatabase would constantly reinterpret and rein-scribe the survivors’ stories in ways that not onlyplace the listener into an active relationship ofresponsibility but also unleash the potential ofmeaning in every act of indexing. Narrativeswould be heard in their polyphony, with somelisteners hearing some things and others hear-ing different things. We would never be done lis-tening, watching, and processing the testimoniesbecause there is always “more”—a surplus ofmeaning—that is never absolutely captured indata or databases. In essence, the “ethics of thealgorithm” is an attempt—through ever thickerrelationships between data and narrative, telling,and retelling—to bring together computationand information architecture with the ethical ob-ligation of listening. In other words, it is a wayto constantly transform the immensity of thearchive and the “big data” in the database backinto individual stories encountered through anethic of active listening and participation.

To learn more about Presner’s research with theVisual History Archive, visit: www.toddpresner.com 1 Geoffrey Hartman, The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of theHolocaust (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1996), 133.

2 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. EricPrenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1996), 36.

Making connections Partial network diagram of the Visual History Archive database showing survivorinterconnections based on keywords and communities.

IN JANUARY 2014, four scholars from the Holo-caust Geographies Collaborative—an interna-tional, interdisciplinary group of researchers—spent a week at USC to work intensively in theInstitute’s Visual History Archive. Their chargewas to evaluate the link between personal testi-

mony, the index of the archive, and geography.The Holocaust Geographies Collaborative has its origins in a 2007 summer

research workshop sponsored by the United States Holocaust Memorial Mu-seum, where a team of nine researchers met to experiment with geographicalconcepts and methods that the researchers thought could lead to new under-standing of the Holocaust as an event that occurred in both space and time. In

the years that followed, we worked with testimo-nial evidence to varying degrees, most notablyin a study of the evacuations—or “deathmarches”—out of Auschwitz in January 1945and another of Wehrmacht atrocities in Belarus,but our projects have primarily focused onbuilding digital infrastructure to establish thestructural geographies of Holocaust locationsand events. For the next phase of our collabora-tive research we have decided to systematicallyexplore the potential of testimonies as a sourcefor geographical analysis. Testimonies providea profound source with which to reconstruct thesocial circumstances of the victims. For exam-ple, testimonies could help us study how socialnetworks (e.g., families) move through spaceand time.

We are convinced that the Visual HistoryArchive’s index of nearly 52,000 interviewswill enable us to expand the next stages of ourwork by mapping thousands of survivor trajec-tories through the Holocaust. In the course ofour exploration of the archive, it quickly be-came clear that while the index contains a greatamount of geographical information—placesof birth, residence, incarceration—there wasfar richer material within the testimoniesthemselves. For example, working with the tes-timony of Gilberto Salmoni, an Italian survivor,we came to see that while the index allowed usto map the Salmoni family’s movementsthrough Italy and into the camp system, onlylistening carefully to his testimony revealed thefine grains of experience we now seek to un-derstand. The index might provide a city’sname where an individual spent time duringthe war, but only the interview offers the micro-geographies of frequent movement within acity, and will help us reconstruct the spatial tra-jectory of the victim through a series of Italiandetention camps before final deportation tocamps outside Italy. And only at that level couldwe glean the significance of both movementand places to Holocaust survivors. In his testi-mony, Salmoni describes places, people, andevents that unfold at a continental scale.

Judith Agular’s story, on the other hand,takes place entirely in Budapest, as she criss-crossed the river Danube from Pest to Buda,then back to Pest, and over to Buda again. Butwhen Agular’s story is mapped conceptually, itis clear that she moved through a series of dis-tinct places, each with particular meaning.Forced to leave her family home when ghet-

The authors are members of a multi-institutional

research group that uses mapping and geography

to examine spaces and places of the Holocaust.

For biographies, see pages 4 through 5.

A New MethodologyBy Tim Cole, Alberto Giordano, Anne Kelly Knowles, and Paul B. JaskotTestimonies as narratives of place, time, and social relationships

can lead to new understanding of the Holocaust

Jewish-designated residencesFrom 16 June 1944 to November 1944Designated 16 June 1944, removed 22 June 1944From 22 June 1944 to November 1944


Mapping experiences: Geographers use information—like the data on this map showing the evolution of Jew-ish ghettoization in Budapest during the Holocaust—to reconstruct the social circumstances of victims.

Charting the World with testimony

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places formed through experience.Two overlapping ideas became increasingly

important to us. Firstly, and perhaps most sig-nificantly, we became aware of the importanceof place in survivors’ Holocaust experiences.Geographers tend to distinguish between“space” and “place,” seeing the former as amore abstract notion and the latter as imbuedwith meaning. Previously, much of our workhas focused on space, for example, the growthand demise of the SS camp system across Eu-rope, the building of Auschwitz, or the shiftingshape of ghettoization in Budapest. Such workis critical for placing survivor testimonieswithin the broader geographies of ghettos andcamps, but it says little about how those placeswere experienced, understood, reworked intosites of resistance or hiding, and later retold inpostwar interviews. After watching multipletestimonies, we came to see them as central toany understanding of the Holocaust as anevent experienced as a series of places lived andrecollected by the victims as relationships, notonly with the physical world of the ghetto, thecamp, or the train but with other people. And

that’s how place is often described: as geogra-phies of relations, and quite particular relationsat that. In fact, one of the aspects that struck usmost while listening to testimonies was thesurvivors’ tendency to detail their relationshipswith other individuals or bystanders, evenwhen these relationships incorporate feelingsof fear and danger, while largely avoiding de-scriptions of perpetrators. Alongside this, a sec-ond theme emerged from our analysis: that thespatial is social and the social is spatial. As peo-ple, like Salmoni and Agular, moved through aseries of places, social networks played a criti-cal role in the meaning of those places and the

A Map to PreventionBy Samuel Gustman, the Institute’s chief technology officer

Human Geography is a subfield of geography that studieseverything about people in terms of spaces and places.Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are computer systems that model real-world phenomena by combininggeographic data sets with almost any other kind of dataset and provides tools that allow analysis and visualization

of the results, using maps. The USC Shoah Foundation strives to enable human geographersto combine the data and information in the Visual History Archive with geographic data sets,enabling visual explanations of what happened, new insights into the events that occurred,and eventually build predictive models that can be compared to modern events in order togive early warning signs of future genocides.Often, GIS models are built from networks. Networks are the connections between pieces

of data and information, which follow certain models of behavior. The spatial network modelmost people are familiar with in GIS are the directions they get from traffic navigation sys-tems, which perform a network analysis of street, traffic, and other data to give someone apath from point A to point B. To enable human geographers to create network models using the testimonies, the Shoah

Foundation utilizes structures created between keywords, images, people, and locations at-tached to one-minute segments of testimony. These structures allow human geographers tocreate spatial network models, using testimony. Currently, the Shoah Foundation exposes the underlying geographic data attached to the

survivor stories through a mapping interface in the Visual History Archive. Researchers canuse maps to explore any location and what testimonies and topics are mentioned in those locations, jumping directly into the testimony to hear about those locations. It is our hope that by using current and new cataloguing data, the intersection of genocide

studies and human geography will be further enabled, providing insight into what happenedand still is happening.


toization was implemented in June 1944,Agular moved with her father, mother, and auntinto one room of a crowded two-room apart-ment. From here she—along with thousands ofother women and men of working age—duringan armed raid by Nyilas (the Hungarian fascistparty) in the fall of 1944 was taken to a brickfactory in Obuda, where she huddled with fivewomen from the ghetto apartment building tokeep warm. Although most of these prisonerswere marched westward, Agular was releasedand returned to her home district, where shelived and worked in a Red Cross children’shome in the so-called “International Ghetto”area. She escaped another Nyilas armed raid byfleeing to a nearby convent. She finally found ahiding place in a Buda timber yard owned by acommunist sympathizer, then the home of anon-Jewish acquaintance, and the apartment ofher non-Jewish uncle. It was he who placed herwith a caretaker of a four-story apartment build-ing in Buda. Agular remembers the woman asbeing “cruel.” She was sheltered there until lib-eration in early 1945.

As Salmoni’s and Agular’s testimonies un-folded, it was clear that rather than comparingthe spatial trajectories of thousands of sur-vivors like Agular, studying the particularitiesof one individual’s movements would enable adeeper explanation of what kinds of placeswere seen to offer safety or opportunities forresistance, how these places were experiencedby various survivors, and how interpersonalnetworks played a role in survival and resist-ance. A new methodology of Holocaust geog-raphy was right before our eyes, talking to us.

Listening to testimonies of other survivorswho worked at many sites of forced labor, we fur-ther realized that remembered details of workplaces and relationships with fellow prisonersand perpetrators are vital for understanding howlabor could both save and kill. Having mappedthe general patterns of specific kinds of forcedlabor in the SS camps system, we now saw a vastnew terrain of evidence to explore. The testi-mony reveals how prisoners experienced forcedlabor from place to place, and how the character-istics of those places and the people who inhab-ited them created fleeting moments ofopportunity or luck or comradeship—chances tocounter the extreme force of Nazi brutality. Fur-thermore, labor is described not so much interms of specific spaces but in terms of spatialrelationships of proximity and distance in spaceand in time. For us, this topological understand-ing of space suggests that survivors perceived theplaces of forced labor, and not as the physical lo-cations that the SS so carefully planned but as

“Working with the testimony ofGilberto Salmoni, an Italian survivor,we came to see that while the indexallowed us to map the Salmoni fam-ily’s movements through Italy andinto the camp system, only listeningcarefully to his testimony revealedthe fine grains of experience we nowseek to understand.”

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THE MERITS OF personal storytelling are unques-tionable, and they simply cannot be exaggerated.As an adolescent growing up in Europe, I thoughtI knew about the Holocaust, and I certainly knewmany of the related historical facts. But the sheer

cruelty of the events and the depth of the human tragedy only overwhelmed mewhen I visited Anne Frank’s attic in Amsterdam and when I read her diary. Theevents became connected to one individual, and the pain was thus personalized.

The mechanism behind such a strong connection was first discovered by Aris-totle, who detected our ability to identify with the characters of a play and assumethe characters’ emotions vicariously. Freud concurred, more than two millennialater, and so does modern neuroscience as it describes the nerve cells and the neuralsystems that allow each of our brains to assume the role of another person, embodythe emotions of that person, and feel a version of their feelings.

So, if one wishes to tell a story to which others can deeply respond and not for-get, one should tell a personal story and give it the power to evoke strong emotionsand subsequent feelings. There is no dearth of such stories related to the Holocaust,and there is no need to modify them to fit some model of storytelling effectiveness.The entire period of the Holocaust is made up of such personal stories, and the factthat they are available in video version renders them even more effective humanly.

I remember the first time I visited the USC Shoah Foundation and saw andheard the testimonies of survivors. I found the experience no less devastatingthan that of my long-ago visit in Amsterdam.

Are there downsides and risks to the personalization of human drama and itsinevitable emotional punch? Indeed there are, and they are not small. One well-identified risk concerns the kind of memory that such experiences generate. Emo-tional power cuts in dual ways. On the one hand it helps produce indeliblememory traces, but on the other, beyond a certain level, emotional power blursdetails and promotes the memory of generalities, most of all generalities of pain,suffering, and pity, separated from the specific facts that belong to the episode.

A related risk concerns the over-personalization of narratives and the efface-ment of the universal aspects of the situation—moral and political, for exam-ple—in favor of incidents. Well-written novels, plays, and films work best whenthey are personal, no doubt, for all the reasons I gave earlier. But what if the per-sonalized emotion obfuscates deeper realities of historical fact? What if thememories that result from such effective stories favor the panglossian gloss?

I have been impressed by how well the USC Shoah Foundation has navigatedthese storytelling waters. May it continue to do so, especially as it moves its sightsto more recent human horrors whose final consequences are still the same asthe Holocaust’s—suffering and destruction of dignity and life — but whose his-torical and political contexts are not as transparent as those of World War II.

Understanding testimony

Emotion, Storytelling, andthe Human UniversalsBy Antonio Damasio How personal stories can evoke deep empathy for human tragedy

Antonio Damasio is USC University Professor of

Psychology and Neurology. For a full biography,

see page 4.

role they played in survival. For Salmoni, a re-mark by an acquaintance at the Milan train sta-tion prevented the entire family from beingimmediately deported to Auschwitz. Factoryworkers and political prisoners in Milan of-fered Salmoni’s pregnant sister Dora extra foodand protection, although her ultimate fate wasto be murdered in Auschwitz with her motherand father. For Agular, her aunt joining themin the ghetto house was critically important be-cause she had worked in a bakery before thewar and so she could get hold of bread. Agu-lar’s journey to Buda at the end of the war wasa journey not just to a place but also to a per-son—the non-Jewish uncle who ultimatelyfound a hiding place for her.

Testimonies are not only a narrative ofplaces, times, and events but, perhaps moreprofoundly, a narrative of social relations,which are continuously broken apart and re-created through space and time. Our week ex-ploring the Visual History Archive andworking together sharpened our interest in un-derstanding how places and social relation-ships might help explain survival, and hasprovided a basis for developing a larger re-search project in connection with the USCShoah Foundation Center for Advanced Geno-cide Research. This project will be centered on

a synergistic approach to narratives, in whichwe will study survival as the product of relation-ships between geography, history, and the vic-tim’s social status and social networks, with theultimate objective to develop an explanatoryframework for survival for Holocaust andgenocide researchers. We hope our researchwill also result in new and improved methodsof indexing testimonies, which will allow teach-ers, students, and the general public to developpersonal paths of exploration of the Visual His-tory Archive and other similar archives.

To learn more visit: http://www.ushmm.org/learn/mapping-initiatives/geographies-of-the-holocaust

“Studying the particularities of oneindividual’s movements would en-able a deeper explanation of whatkinds of places were seen to offersafety or opportunities for resistance,how these places were experiencedby various survivors, and how inter-personal networks played a role in survival and resistance. A newmethodology of Holocaust geogra-phy was right before our eyes.”


TwentyYears LaterThe Legacy of Schindler’s List and the USC Shoah Foundation

PastForward Special Anniversary Feature

Holocaust survivor Poldek Pfefferberg shares his photo album and his memories with Spielberg and other members of the Schindler's List cast and crew.The testimony of Pfefferberg, also known as Leopold Page, can be viewed at: vhaoline.usc.edu

OSKAR SCHINDLER never could have imagined how his acts ofhuman decency would spread and grow as new people learnedof his story. He was living for the moment, not the history books.

But the lesson of his life—that one person can make theworld a better place—has been handed from person to person,and from generation to generation.

The chain from past to present started with Schindler survivorPoldek Pfefferberg, who brought the incredible story to writerThomas Keneally, whose book inspired Steven Spielberg to makehis landmark film Schindler’s List and establish the USC ShoahFoundation—The Institute for Visual History and Education.

The USC Shoah Foundation carries this message from thepast forward.

In 1994, the focus of the Institute was on capturing 50,000testimonies from survivors and witnesses. In 2014 the focus ison teaching with testimonies.

The recently announced Center for Advanced Genocide Re-search will advance the next significant chapter for the Institute,

leading research and scholarship on the Holocaust and other genocides to better understandhow and why genocides occur, and how to intervene in the cycle that leads to genocide.

As USC Shoah Foundation expands its global reach, even more students, researchers, andscholars who use Visual History Archive to connect with survivor and witness testimony, willhave the opportunity to learn how they too can make the world a better place.

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Preserving the LegacySteven Spielberg joined with Holocaust survivors who gave testimony

to USC Shoah Foundation. (bottom, left to right) Sonia Papper, Janet Rosmarin, Steven Spielberg, Dora Pinto, Jack Pinto. (top, left to right) John Helman,

Selma Stoff, Frieda Tamboryn, Henry Rosmarin, Gar ry Tumin, Olga Bitterman, Edward Koslowski, Daisy Miller.

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Transformed by TestimonyTwenty years later, students who have been transformed by testimonies in the

Visual History Archive gather around Steven Spielberg. (bottom, left to right) Mingyi Wang, Tara Adarkar, Steven Spielberg, Corah Forrester, Graham Finch. (center, left to right)

Ashlen Weddington, Victor Ewubor, Turner Thompson, Alex Biniaz-Harris. (top, left to right) Cassidy Stein, Jordan Lustman, Fiona Captan, Jocelyn Cash.

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he key to resisting the path to geno-cide is early intervention, but beforeone can intervene, one must have inhand detailed information and evi-

dence. Collecting testimony after the brutalitysubsides has been an immensely powerful toolin changing the way people look at genocideand how to prevent it in the future. But to date,it has been of little help in real time, whilecrimes against humanity are actively occurring.

It is important when we are assessing whatis happening on the ground to hear the voicesof real people and what they are experiencing.With advances in technology, it is now possibleto interview victims and share their storiesacross the world instantly and while there isstill time to help them. The faster we hear fromthem directly, the more it can help in reachingour ultimate goal of early intervention.

This sounds good in principle, but collectingtestimony in real time raises moral, ethical,and legal questions, that must be addressed.

For example, what obligation does an inter-viewer have to help someone who is facing im-minent danger? Are we just asking them torecount their suffering without offering prac-tical assistance? The people we need to hearfrom most are likely to be in the greatest dan-ger and have the least access to basic necessi-ties such as food, health care, water, andsanitation.

If we need to enter a war zone to relay infor-mation, how does that make us different fromjournalists? Where is the line between objec-tive reporting and advocacy? We must alwaysbe alert to the fact that people will try to pro-mote their own side of a story, which may notalways comport with reality.

The work of Tomo Križnar, a Slovenian jour-nalist, documentarian, and human rights ac-tivist who has been actively lobbying for peacein Sudan for over 16 years, is instructive. He,with the help of H.O.P.E. Humanitarian Foun-dation, a Slovenian nonprofit, handed out cam-

eras in the Nuba Mountains of Sudan. Ordinarypeople were thus able to videotape the destruc-tion around them, and these reports were thenmade accessible on the Internet. This is oneform of real-time testimony, and a great start.But to have the greatest impact and to reach asmany people as possible, such documentationalso needs infrastructure and the kind of expert-ise that the USC Shoah Foundation can bring.The power and global reach of the Visual His-tory Archive, coupled with organizations andpartners on the ground, could create the meansfor many more people to be heard.

Testimony may not be limited to victims butcan be taken from other involved people,whose insights could generate responsible ac-tion. As the head of the United Nations mis-sion in Sudan in 2003–2004, I experiencedvividly the genocidal violence unfolding on adaily basis in Darfur, which my United Nationscolleagues back in the head office could notsee. Reporting daily is comparable to an air-

Resisting the Path to GenocideCollecting testimony in real time as events are unfoldingBy Mukesh Kapila

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Real-Time testimony

plane’s black box, which records what the pilotis doing. If the plane crashes, you can analyzewhat the pilot was doing at the time of thecrash. I could imagine the head of a United Na-tions organization or other responsible author-ity reporting in real time what they arewitnessing. Like a personal video diary, itwould provide an important record of whatthey knew, whom they spoke to, and the dilem-mas and choices they faced on a daily basis.

However, we must be careful with what peoplein vulnerable situations entrust in us. There arethose who could use the information we gatherin the wrong way. But that’s no different from theuse or misuse of information at other times. It isimportant to follow proper rules and ensure thatthe person being interviewed has given his or herinformed consent. While some social and tech-nical questions must be addressed, the ability togather real-time testimony and do it consis-tently would, in principle, be an enormous con-tribution to the area of mass-atrocity prevention.

What I know for certain, from working inthe field, is that most affected people are onlytoo ready to share their stories, because theybelieve that if we hear from them directly, wewill take on some of their burden of sufferingand do something to help them.

Just being heard may bring solace to victims.And it is remarkable how often people in intenselydifficult situations are willing to tell of their expe-riences despite the risks to which they may exposethemselves in so doing. For example, I was struckby someone’s testimony, which I listened to inBlue Nile state—a long-suffering part of Sudan

that is even more forgotten than the Nuba orDarfur. I asked her what I could do for her, andshe laughed and said, “What can you do for me?You’re a good man. Thanks for coming. I’m bornhere, and I will die here, and I worry that no onewill ever know I existed or what suffering I wentthrough. Please, can you tell the world what Iam telling you? That’s enough for me.”


Mukesh Kapila, CBE, is Professor of Global Health

and Humanitarian Affairs at the University of

Manchester. For a full biography, see page 5.

“I was struck by someone’s testimony, which I listened to in Blue Nilestate—a long-suffering part of Sudan that is even more forgotten than theNuba or Darfur. I asked her what I could do for her, and she laughed andsaid, “What can you do for me? You’re a good man. Thanks for coming. I’m born here, and I will die here, and I worry that no one will ever know I existed or what suffering I went through. Please, can you tell the worldwhat I am telling you? That’s enough for me.”

Real-time testimonyMukesh Kapila speaking with women who are at the frontline of continued ethnically directed violence in Sudan.

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E OPEN NEWSPAPERS every dayand read about atrocities beingcommitted all over the world.We see graphic images, read

the stories—and, for many of us, go back to ourbusy lives. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

How humans can so brutally terrorize otherhumans is, thankfully, unfathomable to mostpeople. Yet it happens. It has always happened,and—without sweeping societal changes—itwill continue to happen.

But imagine if we could anticipate where thenext major genocide was going to occur andstop it before even one person died? What toolswould we need to be so predictive and, quitefrankly, clairvoyant?

I firmly believe that the USC Shoah Founda-tion’s Visual History Archive holds many keysto unlocking the enigmatic conditions that haveled to genocides throughout history. Here atUSC, we have a database of people’s experiencesand emotions under the worst possible circum-

stances throughout the last 100 years. While the field of digital humanities is often

overlooked in discussions of big data, the Vi-sual History Archive is a beautiful example ofhow we can use an extremely large database tolearn, teach, and heal.

With nearly 52,000 testimonies from sur-vivors and witnesses—ranging from the Holo-caust and World War II Europe to the NanjingMassacre and the Rwandan Tutsi genocide—theVisual History Archive shows how digital tech-nology can meld with humanitarian inquiry toaddress some of society’s most complicated is-sues. The Visual History Archive is both user-friendly—all 1.2 million names are easilysearchable—and societally relevant. It is a stel-lar model of how big data can serve both fifthgraders—who have the opportunity to learnabout the Holocaust by hearing firsthand ac-counts—and neuroscientists, who can use it as adatabase to help unlock enigmatic brain function.

For me, one of the most profoundly inspira-

tional uses of the Visual History Archive is thatof Glenn Fox. As a doctoral student, Fox forgeda partnership between USC Dornsife’s Brainand Creativity Institute and the USC ShoahFoundation to conduct the first study on grati-tude by using both functional brain imaging andrecorded testimonies of Holocaust survivors.

After watching hours of footage, Fox and histeam collected a number of scenarios that wouldelicit feelings of gratitude, and read them to sub-jects who were connected to brain scanners.Using these findings, Fox is making break-throughs in our understanding of human behav-ior and emotion—a concept that spans almostevery field and aspect of human experience.

Going forward, I believe that all researcherswill need to be similarly well rounded. I envisionthe availability of large databases pushing schol-ars to think creatively about how they bothgather and use data—and that includes studentsstudying English, philosophy, history, physics,and all other concentrations. Nobody is exempt

Big Data and humanity

Using Stories as Data and Data to Tell StoriesA look at how scholars can harness big data to learn, teach, and healBy Steve Kay

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from learning to collect and harness data if heor she wants to make lasting societal changes.

In 2013, the University of Southern Californialaunched a 10-year Initiative in Informatics andDigital Knowledge—with USC Dornsife at theforefront of the effort—that emphasizes suchareas of inquiry as the quantitative social sci-ences. In 2014, USC Dornsife has taken centerstage in organizing a five-year Digital HumanitiesProgram supported by a grant from the AndrewW. Mellon Foundation. The program will focuson training graduate students and postdoctoralfellows in digital technology, expanding publiclyavailable digital archives, and implementingpublic programs designed to explore aspects ofart and literature in the digital humanities.

When I reflect upon the importance of thiswork, the USC Shoah Foundation is always thefirst example that comes to mind. Why? Be-cause I can describe powerful images of youngstudents learning about the Holocaust by hear-ing firsthand accounts. I can recount the bril-

liant discussions I’ve heard taking place amongthese students—hearing dialogues that couldnever be sparked simply by reading facts in atextbook or viewing figures on a blackboard. Iuse the Visual History Archive as a spring-board into conversations of how nontraditionaldatabases can be used to transcend fields andspecific areas of inquiry in order to serve an in-ternational community of scholars, educators,and students—and even individuals searchingtheir own genealogical histories.

I like to share the story of high school teacherPeter Cook, who was so excited about the ideaof using the Visual History Archive in his class-room that he hand-delivered his application forthe Institute’s Master Teacher program. Cook,an economics and history teacher at CaminoNuevo Charter Academy in Los Angeles, said hewas floored by the work his students were ableto produce, using the Visual History Archive.He recalled that one student had embarked ona research project focusing on Hitler’s strate-

gies, but—after spending time searchingthrough the Visual History Archive, he changedhis study and began investigating Nazi propa-ganda, truly delving into the political intricacies.

Cook mentioned another student who usedthe Visual History Archive’s incredible searchcapabilities to study the history of Jehovah’s Wit-nesses during the Holocaust—a creative andnovel concept. I was particularly moved by thestory of a student who became interested inusing the Visual History Archive to learn moreabout deportation, because it resonated with herown life and her mother’s personal experience.

It is in this way that I believe humanities-based databases have an incredible capacity toteach and heal. For our students, the USCShoah Foundation’s testimonies are a powerfultool for understanding history, politics, psy-chology—everything that encompasses thehuman condition.

The Visual History Archive and the missionof USC Dornsife are perfectly aligned. As a sci-entist, my personal goal—and my goal asdean—is to tackle some of society’s most diffi-cult humanitarian challenges by employing aninterdisciplinary approach that blends informat-ics, science, technology, and the humanities.

My ultimate mission is to support translationalresearch and translational education. What doesthat mean? By providing access for middle- andhigh school teachers to the Visual HistoryArchive, we are making it possible for students—during their most impressionable stages—to ex-perience an invaluable opportunity to learncompassion and to be inspired to make changes.

Then, once at the undergraduate level atUSC, our students can learn to search the Vi-sual History Archive independently in order torefine their ideas on what exactly are the chal-lenges that they want to solve. Finally, at thegraduate and postdoctoral levels, they can begintruly to mine the data for trends and patterns.

I honestly believe that, as it continues togrow, the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual His-tory Archive can emerge as a leading tool forscholars worldwide as they seek resolution toproblems we had previously considered unsolv-able. Its unprecedented size and search capaci-ties can become an international playground forcreative thinkers—who will find ways to iden-tify the patterns—and unravel them.

Steve Kay is dean of the USC Dornsife College

of Letters, Arts and Sciences. For a full biography,

see page 5.

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OSHUA OPPENHEIMER’S LANDMARK newdocumentary, The Act of Killing, accom-plishes something few films have beenable to do: bring viewers inside the livesof real mass murderers. “Imagine,” Op-

penheimer told an audience during a conver-sation we had following a recent screening ofthe film, “that you were in Germany 40 yearsafter the Second World War, but the Nazis hadwon and were still in power.” You would, headded, be in a place much like contemporaryIndonesia, the setting of The Act of Killing. Andyou would find, as he did, people in power,who—far from being ashamed of the crimesthey had committed—celebrate their killings.

Taking advantage of this openness and theimpunity that the killers still enjoy, Oppen-heimer was given an expansive look at howmass murders were carried out and how theperpetrators remain in power. Starting in 2004and continuing over the next several years, heinterviewed hundreds of people responsible for

the 1965 genocide that helped sweep GeneralSuharto into power. Among the many thingsthe film accomplishes is to expose the societalfabric of state-sponsored violence— the web ofrelationships between state officials, media,paramilitaries, international governmental andcorporate partners, people responsible for theactual slayings, citizens terrorized into accept-ance of a ruling regime, and an expandingnumber of globalized consumers who mightbest be described, as Richard Nixon did aboutdifferent citizens in a different time, as a great,silent majority. Viewed as a guided tourthrough the state apparatus of mass murder,the film is a triumph of clarity and breadth, andreveals, like nothing I’ve seen, the social net-work necessary to commit enormous crimes.If nothing else, The Act of Killing puts to an endany notion that violence on a massive scale issolely the work of individual madmen.

Oppenheimer accomplishes this by taking uson an extraordinary journey with the film’s

main character, Anwar Congo, a gangsterturned death squad leader turned celebratedparamilitary officer. The film presents Congo’sstruggle to re-enact for Oppenheimer’s cam-eras—an enterprise that includes casting vic-tims and restaging massacres—the murders heorchestrated nearly 50 years ago. The dramaticquestion, like some nightmarish, hallucinatory“let’s-put-on-a-show” musical, centers on whetherAnwar can produce and star in scenes of killingthat will compose, to use his words, a “beautifulfamily movie” about his “glorious past.” Thefilm’s inner drama, however, deliberatelyprobes Congo’s seemingly untroubled con-science and asks whether he’ll wake to the hor-ror and human consequence of his actions. Wehope that he, like a character in Greek tragedy,is moving inexorably toward recognition andthe imaginative transformation that accompa-nies it. We are not disappointed.

In this way The Act of Killing is a film aboutimagination, both individual and collective; the

The Killer WithinWhat The Act of Killing brings to our understanding of violenceBy Ted Braun

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genocide in Film


failure of imagination that seems a prerequi-site for mass violence; the strange ways imagi-nation can be blinded, distorted, and abused tomaintain power; and the importance of imagi-nation in reckoning with and repairing thedamage of horrific crimes.

Anyone who looks even briefly into the his-tory of genocide and state-sponsored violencequickly becomes aware that the rhetorical andconceptual dehumanization of a targetedgroup are determinative steps down the pathtoward mass murder: Tutsis become cock-roaches; Jews vermin; Native Americans dogs.But in the wake of these horrors, what happenswhen the time comes to deal with those re-sponsible for the killing? If victims, other sur-vivors, and their supporters turn around anddismiss the murderers as inhuman mon-sters—demonize them as something otherthan people—surely we run the risk of perpet-uating an endless cycle of violence. One of thegreat and challenging aspects of The Act of

Killing is its staunch refusal to dehumanize thekillers who are its subject. Oppenheimer pres-ents Congo and his collaborators as human be-ings whom we can understand and with whomwe can even empathize. He does this withoutlosing a moral posture, which condemns theiractions unequivocally. But the insight we gainby inhabiting the lives of Congo and his fellowexecutioners, however briefly, is extraordinary.We return to our own lives with perspective—on others and on ourselves. And this may bean even greater contribution to our under-standing of violence than his brilliant taxon-omy of the state apparatus of genocide.

At one point in the film, Oppenheimer asksAdi Zulkadry, one of Congo’s fellow deathsquad leaders, whether he considers his ac-

tions in 1965 to be war crimes. Zulkadry is un-repentant: “‘War crimes’ are defined by thewinners. I’m a winner. So I can make my owndefinitions. … Americans killed the Indians.Has anybody been punished for that?”

By allowing us to understand Congo andZulkadry instead of dismissing them as inhumanmonsters, we are invited, troubling though it maybe, to see in their celebration of murder—and itsalmost surreal use of American cinematic genres—something of our own society and its story-telling, and to wonder about some of the most

“The insight we gain by inhabiting the lives of Congo and his fellow execu-tioners, however briefly, is extraordinary. We return to our own lives withperspective—on others and on ourselves. And this may be an even greater contribution to our understanding of violence.”

Writer-director Ted Braun is associate professor

of screenwriting at USC’s School of Cinematic

Arts. For a full biography, see page 4

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Understanding violence Perpetrators of the 1965–1966 Indonesian killings glorify their actions in a musical reenactment scene from the documentary The Act of Killing.

treasured parts of our national narrative. In theaftermath of Oppenheimer’s film, the games ofcowboys and Indians of many a childhood, andthe ritualized drama of countless Westerns, seemnot so much play-acting or good, old-fashionedentertainment but a re-enactment of genocide.For provoking this profound reconsideration weowe Oppenheimer a great debt. In dancing withCongo and watching him celebrate his murders,it only seems as if we are doing something shock-ingly new. The Act of Killing reminds us that, infact, we’ve been here many times before: as set-tlers claimed land on the plains and fought back“savages,” and as the cavalry crested the hill andcharged to the rescue. This brilliant documentaryinvites us to reflect that from its beginnings,American film has celebrated our own acts ofkilling and offered them up to the world as cine-matic pleasure. By prompting this startling recog-nition of the societal state-sponsored killer within,Joshua Oppenheimer has lit a path for Ameri-cans to imagine a way forward out of the blind-ness and illusions of the past.

This year The Act of Killing was nominated for an Academy Award in the feature docu-

mentary category. The film was of particular interest to those who work in the field of testi-

mony as Oppenheimer interviewed many perpetrators of killings in Indonesia in the 1960s.

Below is an excerpt from Oppenheimer’s talk, describing his own journey of discovery as

he encountered perpetrators willing to talk, even boast about their acts of killing.

The Making of The Act of KillingBy Joshua Oppenheimer

I first went to Indonesia in 2001 to help agroup of palm-oil plantation workers make afilm documenting their struggle to organizea union in the aftermath of the Suharto dicta-torship, when unions were illegal. I didn’tknow anything about the Indonesian geno-cide. I didn’t know it had occurred.Right after we made that film, these people

whom I knew and understood were survivorsof the genocide asked me to come back tomake another film about an even darker chap-ter in their history. They wanted me to docu-ment what it’s like to live every day when theperpetrators of violence are still in power. “Try to film the perpetrators,” they asked.

“Try to film the aging death-squad leaderswho live all around us. Start with your next-door neighbor. They can tell you if they havekilled our relatives.” I then spent two years filming every perpetra-

tor I could find across Malaysia or Sumatra. Tomy horror, not only were they open about whatthey had done, they even boasted about it.They would tell these awful stories withsmiles on their faces and in front of their

grandchildren, even. Listening to them, I had thesense that I was getting some-thing closer to performancethan to the sober testimonyto which we’re accustomedas filmmakers. This raised many ques-

tions for me. For whomwere they performing? Isthis how they want others tosee them? And how do theysee themselves, and why? I felt if I could answer these

questions, the whole façadethat the genocide was some-thing heroic would somehowcome crumbling down. I met Anwar Congo in 2005. He

was the 41st perpetrator I filmed inthat period, and I did something thatI didn’t do with the previous 40.

The first day I met him, I could see that he felt some kind of trauma, and I wonderedif he would recognize the meaning of what he had done, the meaning of what he wastalking about.And so I screened the footage back to

him. There is a moment in the beginning ofthe film when you see him watching himselfon the roof. It’s clear that he is disturbedabout something, and it’s easy to assume he’s thinking “Oh no, this is awful.” Or“What I have I done?” Or “This is going tomake me look bad.” But he doesn’t dare, because to say any

of those things would be to admit that his actions were wrong. Instead, fueled by hisvanity, I suppose, he says what’s wrong is hisclothing, and his hair, and his acting. And heproposes an improvement, as though if hecould make the scene right, he could makewhat he did right. So began this five-year process, which

was essentially the same method again andagain. I would agree to shoot each new scenethat he would propose because it was alwaysshedding new light on either what they did, or on the regime that is still in place today.Victims can tell you about it. They can

tell you about what they’ve lost, about the experience of living with terrible loss, but they can’t tell you about what made the peo-ple do it. And so we have to talk to perpetra-tors, including perpetrators who are stillflourishing with impunity. The editor of Tempo Magazine, the largest

news publication in Indonesia, phoned meafter he saw a longer cut of the film. He said,“Josh, there was a time before The Act ofKilling, now there will be a time after The Actof Killing. I’ve been censoring stories aboutthis genocide for as long as I’ve been in thisjob. And I won’t do it anymore. Because yourfilm shows me, above all, that I don’t want to grow old as a perpetrator.”

28 pastforwar

Joshua Oppenheimer is senior researcher on the UK Arts and HumanitiesResearch Council’s Genocideand Genre project and haspublished widely on thesethemes. For a full biography,see page 5.


RWANDA IS Mille Collines, The Land of a ThousandHills; it is gorgeous, lush, and green. Local folkloresays that God wanders the world during the dayand comes home to Rwanda to sleep at night.

Yet I study photos of bodies piled up at road-blocks on Kigali streets taken during the 1994

genocide. Just 20 years ago one million Tutsi were murdered in Rwanda, oftenby their own neighbors or friends. Hutu who did not comply were targetedand murdered, as well. Driving through downtown, we pass a large brickchurch, Saint Famille—so clean, so modern—where thousands of people, be-lieving they had found sanctuary, were betrayed. Driving out of town, we crossthe bridge over Nyabarongo River, which was, 20 years ago, clotted withcorpses; the water ran red with blood.

I am a theater artist. I am here in Rwanda, at the moment of the 20th com-memoration, confronting the genocide, as a witness and translator of what I

see, hear, and feel.In their daily lives it’s difficult for most peo-

ple to engage with narrative related to catastro-phe or mass atrocity. The experiences survivorsdescribe are complex, deeply disturbing, on somany levels. Artists, however, by virtue of whatthey are trained to do, stand in witness with theintention of bringing forth expression withwhich a broad audience can engage. This isuseful: Engagement is the first step toward pre-vention.

Loss is something that most of us, on somelevel, have experienced. Loss is the obviousentry point here. Yet the hundreds of memorialsites where people perished during the geno-cide in Rwanda represent loss beyond our com-prehension. At a single site, tens of thousandsmay have lost their lives. Some of the victimsare buried in coffins, as one would expect, butin some cases the remains of 50 or more sharea single box. Many of the dead have never beenburied; skulls intact, sliced open by machete,smashed by club, riddled by bullets, arearranged on shelves, row after tidy row ofskulls. I study them, take in the elegance of thehuman head, so many, so beautiful. Most ofthe remains are anonymous, but some of theskulls are known, and despite the universal im-perative for “burial with dignity,” there are fam-ilies that choose not to bury their dead. Theyprefer to have them above-ground as evidenceand a silent form of testimony. Survivors wantvisitors to be confronted by the proof that geno-cide happened here in this place, and it hap-pened to them. The unburied are all strangersto me. In their presence, I am touched by theintimacy of my connection with them, nakedas they are.

In everyday life, Rwandan traditions sur-rounding death and loss have a grace and flu-idity, much like the Jewish tradition in which Iwas raised. Like shiva, in which the commu-nity gathers around a family in the immediatedays after a death, so neighbors and friendshere will sit around a bonfire at the back of thedeceased’s family home and remember goodtimes. They sing songs, tell stories and jokes,and present poems in honor of the person whohas died. If it’s the head of family who hasgone, there is a ceremony whereby the mantleof responsibility is passed on to their heir.

Genocide smashes through the native intel-ligence that lived in this culture with regard tomourning—moving from life to death to life—just as the Holocaust smashed through all thedignified traditions of the Jewish community.Everything Rwandans knew about negotiatingtheir way through the inevitability of loss, fold-

An Artist’s PerspectiveBy Stacie ChaikenArt engages broader audiences and raises

awareness of genocide in Rwanda

Stacie Chaiken is founder of Witness and Re-

sponsibility and has created performances involv-

ing conflict, the Middle East, and the Holocaust.

For a full biography, see page 4.

Sharing Art through testimony

Young children proudly show off school supplies in Bumgogo, Rwanda

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ing in grief, doesn’t serve survivors here. Whathappened is too awful; it’s inhuman, unbear-able. We cannot breathe, and therefore we can-not move beyond that never-ending momentof trauma.

That is why testimony is so essential: It al-lows survivors to breathe, to give voice to whathappened. Bones may be eloquent, but they aresilent. Testimony allows an individual the op-portunity to say out loud, “This really hap-pened; it happened here; it happened to us.”

For Rwanda, 20 years after the genocide,“This really happened” remains a vital story totell. There are those who deny there was agenocide. There are perpetrators who liveabroad with impunity; some are quiet, somenot so quiet. Some are armed.

I am a visitor. I have come here to look, lis-ten, and learn. I observe—alongside the pro-found imperative for remembrance, testimony,and dialogue about the genocide—there is anintentional reach to identify with Rwandan cul-ture and traditions. I am moved by this reachto the spirit of dignity (agaciro) that has alwaysbeen, as a reach for the strength to be humanein a landscape that was not so long ago bereftof all humanity, and to move forward as a uni-fied people.

With the genocide, Rwanda is changed for-ever, and when we engage with the history ofRwanda and the Rwandan people, we too arechanged. I am in awe of the courage I see here,the courage to love with all one’s heart whathas been so brutally lost; to float on a streamof unspeakable grief, to ride it, breathe into it,speak it, find safety in one another, and weavethat grief into the fabric of a new, changed life.

None of this is easy, of course. There is nostrength without obstacle, no courage withoutfear. Rwandans are the last to presume to berole models, yet, as they move into the future,there is so much to be learned.

Kwibuka means "remember" in Kinyarwanda,Rwanda’s language. It is used to describe the annual commemoration of the 1994 genocideagainst the Tutsi. To learn more about Kwibuka20,the 20th anniversary commemoration, visit:http://www.kwibuka.rw/

IN RECENT YEARS, domestic and internationalpublic discourse regarding anti-Semitism inHungary has been characterized by banal under-statements and exaggerated overstatements atthe same time. Headlines such as “Hungary:

The Cancer in the Middle of Europe?”; “Fast jeder zweite ungarische Jude über-legte Auswanderung” (“Almost every second Hungarian Jew has considered em-igration”); and “Hungary is anti-Semitic and vile to the Roma. Don’t darelecture us, Mr Commissioner” are often seen in the international press. As aresponse, the Hungarian government resorts to “double standards,” empha-sizing its commitment against anti-Semitism but refusing to confront justifiedclaims about anti-Semitism and the far right in Hungary. We should base ourdecisions on established knowledge, while always being aware of complexities,as well as seek to find meaningful ways to reduce anti-Semitism. Using testi-monies in formal education might be one of these strategies.

Anti-Semitism has obviously increased in the past decade. Research showsthat from 1993 to 2006, 10 percent to 14 percent of respondents found Jewsto be repulsive. By 2008, that figure had jumped to 28 percent, while in 2013it was lower but still high at 21 percent. Although economic crises have a majorrole in the fluctuation of anti-Semitism, their effect is not a given. It dependsupon the political context, and mainly upon whether there is a political forcethat blames Jewish people for the economic and political crisis. In Hungarythe Jobbik party does this systematically.

Anti-Semitism in Hungary is a divisive issue. Unlike anti-Romaism, whichis practically consensual (and even more deeply concerning, as two-thirds ofHungarians think that criminality is in the genes of Gypsies), the attitudes to-ward the Jews are much more polarized. According to our research at PoliticalCapital, we find a high number of anti-Semites, as well as “philosemites” inHungary at the same time. A survey of the Hungarian Internet communityconducted in July 2013 found that 28 percent of the respondents do not likeJews, while 34 percent do. However, antipathy toward Jews is higher amongthe younger respondents, which means that politics built upon anti-Semitismhas serious strategic reserves in Hungary. Jobbik’s main constituency is notthe poor, angry old people1 but the middle-class, relatively well-off, well-edu-cated young adults. It clearly points to the failures of the Hungarian education

Péter Krekó is director of Political Capital,

a policy research and consulting institute in

Hungary. For a full biography, see page 5.

Anti-Semitism in HungaryBy Péter KrekóEducation is necessary to combat Hungary’s

troubling rise in anti-Semitism

testimony in Action

“Artists, however, by virtue of whatthey are trained to do, stand in witness with the intention of bring-ing forth expression with which abroad audience can engage. This is useful: Engagement is the firststep toward prevention.”


system in raising more democratically commit-ted young people, active participants of civil so-ciety, who build their value system on therespect of human rights. It definitely calls fornew approaches in education.

Anti-Semitism is not a one-dimensional phe-nomenon. While political and journalistic dis-course often simplifies the phenomenon ofanti-Semitism, making it seem like a one-di-mensional attitude, there is no other prejudicethat would be as layered and complex, consid-ering its psychology, its influence, and multipleways of expression, than anti-Semitism. Thesofter, more indirect, and subtle the forms ofanti-Semitism are, the more widespread theybecome and the more difficult it is to eliminatethem. In our studies, we found a much higherratio of the more cognitive form of anti-Semi-tism, the “conspiracy anti-Semitism” stereotypeagainst the Jews that sees “invisible” manipu-lations by the Jews acting in secret, than archaic,open, and emotional, “visceral” repudiation. Inpublic discourse we find a wide range of anti-Semitic statements, from the most blatantforms of Holocaust denial, and blood libels, tothe more subtle forms of biased Israel-criticism,the opinion that the Jews deal too much withtheir past, and Jews take advantage of havingbeen victims during the Nazi era. This latteropinion is shared by 68 percent of Hungariansociety, according to a survey for the FriedrichEbert Foundation’s Project on CombatingRight-wing Extremism (Forum Berlin), con-ducted by Andreas Zick and his colleagues.2

The most important threat of anti-Semitismin Hungary is not violence. Anti-Semitism, de-spite the growing number of violent atrocities,is not a problem that is articulated in everyday,personal relations—unlike the anti-Roma atti-tudes that threaten ethnic violence. Anti-Semi-tism is an ideological function, which meansthat for now, the physical and financial securityof the Jews is, in most cases, not at risk. Thegoal of contemporary anti-Semitism is prima-rily the creation of a biased and self-justifyingideological position. Contemporary, conspir-acy-based anti-Semitism gives an explanationto national domestic problems of the citizensand of the country, national historical traumasand losses, domestic conflicts, ethnic tensions,or the economic crises. Anti-Semitism is theopium of the nation, which refuses to faceevery problem and failure, and blames themon a global Jewish conspiracy. This makes thenational community more closed, more arro-gant, and more paranoid, and prevents it fromlearning from the political and historical mis-takes of the past. And it unfortunately captures

the social and political mainstream as well.Anti-Semitism, therefore, poses at least asgreat a danger on the majority of the societythan on the Jews themselves.

The stubbornness of anti-Semitism makes itdifficult to eliminate. If someone is an addict,it is the one who takes it away who will be themost hated. Indoctrination will not work, al-though education might. My experience is thatfacing the problem directly in classroom is ahelpful method—refuting and ridiculing themost widespread conspiracy theories in theclassrooms via informed and open debate. It isimportant not to be afraid of encountering anti-Semitic arguments and instead encourage de-bates with students, even those with anti-Semitic views. But teachers need training, goodarguments, and tools to be able to maintainconfidentiality in the classroom in order toallow for an authentic dialogue, even againstthe most blatant statements. Resources such asthe testimonies of the USC Shoah Foundationprovide knowledge, insight, and understand-ing into the Hungarian classroom, to supportteachers in such classroom debate.

It is not self-evident that remembrance assuch will always have a beneficial effect. AcrossEurope, the more visceral forms of anti-Semi-tism are declining (Hungary is among the few

counter-examples), giving way to new forms ofanti-Semitism such as anti-Semitism-denialand negative reactions to Holocaust remem-brance. In Hungary, a country where more thantwo-thirds of the population thinks that Jews tryto take advantage of having been victims of theHolocaust (even if we think this opinion is out-rageous), putting more emphasis on historicalremembrance of the Holocaust may be a dou-ble-edged sword. If applied wisely and cau-tiously, it can bring beneficial effect. If it is usedto strengthen the recipients’ guilt, the resultmay be even more widespread, stubborn anti-Semitism. The role of carefully structured edu-cation programming is crucial. Change willhappen when we remember the past, and teachabout it in the present, for the future.

1 The Roots of Radicalism and Anti-Roma Attitudes on the Far Righthttp://www.tarki.hu/en/news/2013/items/20130305_bernat_juhasz_kreko_molnar.pdf

2 Intolerance, Prejudice and Discrimination: A European Reporthttp://library.fes.de/pdf-files/do/07908-20110311.pdf

An independent Hungarian member of parliament and former member of the far-right Jobbik party, left,burns an Israeli flag during a 2012 anti-Zionism demonstration in Budapest, Hungary.

“The role of carefully structurededucation programming is crucial.Change will happen when we re-member the past, and teach aboutit in the present, for the future.”

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Refinding the past

Lanzmann, a staunch pro-Israel advocate,wrote and reported on various conflicts in Israeland the Middle East. He published a specialissue of Les Temps Modernes dedicated to theArab-Israeli conflict, and was indicted for his de-nouncement of repression in Algeria.

In 1970, Lanzmann switched to documentaryfilmmaking full-time. He worked on Shoah from1974 to 1985. The nine-hour epic documentarychanged forever the way in which the eyewitnesswould appear in film. Shoah continues to behailed as one of the most significant documen-tary films ever made about the Holocaust.

Lanzmann’s later films continued themesclose to his heart. Israel, Why (1973) examinesthe state of Israel just before the Yom KippurWar, and Tsahal (1994) is about the Israel De-fense Forces. Sobibor, October 14, 1943, 4 p.m.(2001) is about a young man’s escape from theSobibor death camp, and A Visitor from the Liv-ing (1999), is about the falsified InternationalRed Cross report on Theresienstadt.

The Last of the Unjust reveals and builds upona week of interviews Lanzmann conducted withRabbi Benjamin Murmelstein in Rome in 1975.Murmelstein was the last surviving head of theJewish Council of the Theresienstadt ghetto,who battled Adolf Eichmann to prevent the liq-uidation of the ghetto and procure visas sothousands of Jews could escape. Because of hisrole as a leader of the ghetto and his close con-nections to Eichmann and other top Nazis, heremains a controversial figure, hated by many,who feel he betrayed his fellow Jews.

Michael Renov, vice dean of aca-demic affairs at the USC School of Cin-ematic Arts, led the discussion after thescreening and asked Lanzmann to de-scribe his impressions of Murmelstein.

Speaking to the audience at theSchool of Cinematic Arts, Lanzmannreplied, “I was extremely aware of hismagnificent intelligence, acute spirit,and readiness to answer my questions,even if they were not easy to answer, be-cause I was not friendly with him onmany occasions. I began to understandthe fundamental problem of the coun-cils, who were required to collaboratewith Germans. They had no choice—nochoice at all. The role of ‘collaborator’ iscompletely false to describe them anddefine their attitude.”

As the week of interviews withMurmelstein evolved, Lanzmann saidhe was more and more convinced that

FRENCH FILM DIRECTOR and documentarianClaude Lanzmann visited USC Shoah Foundationfor the first time in December, bringing with himhis latest film and a simple request for the future.

Lanzmann’s day, scheduled during the Los An-geles press tour for his new film, The Last of the Unjust, included a meetingwith Executive Director Stephen D. Smith and a public screening of the film fol-lowed by a discussion with the filmmaker at the USC School of Cinematic Arts.

Born in 1925 in Paris, Lanzmann became politically active at a young age, par-ticipating in the French Resistance movement at Blaise Pascal High School in1943. He became friends with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir at theUniversity of Berlin in the 1950s and began contributing to Les Temps Modernes,Sartre’s literary magazine. Today, Lanzmann is the magazine’s editor in chief.

Claude Lanzmann is a French journalist and

filmmaker who directed the landmark documen-

tary Shoah in 1985. For a biography, see page 5.

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The Last of the UnjustExcerpted from an interview conducted by Stephen D. SmithClaude Lanzmann visits USC Shoah Foundation

for the first time and screens his new film

The Institute's Executive Director Stephen D.Smith interviews filmmaker Claude Lanzmann.


Murmelstein had been “unjustly accused byhis Jewish brothers.”

When Renov asked whether the film is a “re-habilitation” of Murmelstein’s image, Lanz-mann pointed out that Murmelstein is honestabout all facets of his work with the Nazis—thegood and the bad.

“[Murmelstein] gives all the weapons to con-demn him, and he shows [everything to] helpto understand him,” Lanzmann said.

In discussion with Smith, Lanzmann under-scored his impression that Murmelstein hadstood in the breach between the Nazis and theJews. “He’s the only one who was courageousenough and intelligent enough to survive, tosave the ghetto of Theresienstadt. Before thishe succeeded to allow 23,000 Jews, AustrianJews, to escape Austria [before the war]. It wasa very difficult task. He had to negotiate with amonster like Eichmann.”

The Last of the Unjust has attracted contro-versy over whether Lanzmann intends to act asan apologist for Murmelstein. In a New YorkTimes review of the film, Stephen D. Smithpraised the film for being willing to tackle adeep and disconcerting matter. “This was Lanz-mann giving [Murmelstein] a chance to clearhis name, but one must not understate thecomplexity,” he said. “He’s good at discerningand getting to the bottom of the complexity ofthe Holocaust. It may not be desirable to every-one’s view, but I think it’s one we need to seeand to grapple with. Not everything Murmel-stein says is true, but it’s true to him.”

When Claude Lanzmann reviewed the Vi-sual History Archive and the USC Shoah Foun-dation’s current work, he said, “It is perfectwork…very important work. Many people andplaces in the world are viewing this, and there[will] be no end.”

Lanzmann had previously expressed skepti-cism about the Shoah Foundation. In 2010, TheNew York Timesquoted him as saying of the ShoahFoundation’s 52,000 testimonies of Holocaustsurvivors and witnesses, “Who will see this?”

Reflecting on the relationship between thevast Visual History Archive of the USC ShoahFoundation and the detailed nature of The Lastof the Unjust, Lanzmann said, “Sometimesthere is a tendency to oversimplification. Idon’t think of this as a critique; this means youhave to dig more and more.”

Wolf Murmelstein, the son of Benjamin Murmel-stein, gave testimony to USC Shoah Foundation’sVisual History Archive in 1998. To locate a VisualHistory Archive access site near you visit:http://sfi.usc.edu/locator

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Understanding testimony

Beyond EvilBy Ervin StaubHelping survivors heal and navigate avenues

to prevention and reconciliation

SURVIVORS OF GENOCIDE are deeply affected.Research has shown that people who are victim-ized, even to a much lesser degree than thosewho are targeted in genocide, tend to perceive theworld as hostile and dangerous. Individuals andgroups that have been greatly harmed typicallyperceive the behavior of other people or wholegroups as a threat to them. They may attempt todefend themselves by force, even when this is notnecessary, becoming harm-doers. Or, deeply af-fected by the cruelty and injustice of the world,and feeling diminished, they may withdraw, dis-tancing themselves from other people. But peo-ple can also become caring and helpful as a resultof their own suffering, especially when they havecertain ameliorating experiences.

An example of how having been targeted for killing can affect perceptioncomes from Rwanda, where there was a genocide against Tutsi in 1994. In 1999I interviewed survivors who were rescued. One of them described how mencame to her house and took away her husband and brother. She had knownthese men before the genocide, and one of them sent another man to her housein order to protect her. This Hutu man arrived with a Bible under his arm, stayedin a room away from her, but when men repeatedly came to the house to takeher away, he confronted them and managed to get them to leave.

When the genocide in Rwanda was stopped by the Rwandan Patriotic Front,the rescuer, apparently afraid because he was a Hutu, left Rwanda for Zaire(now the Congo) together with about one and a half million Hutu. Not longbefore I interviewed this survivor, he returned and came to see the woman.She said to me: “Why did he come? What did he want? Now that the situationhas changed, I can have the government protect me.”

This rescuer never behaved inappropriately toward her, saved her life infact, but presumably because she was so deeply wounded and because he wasa Hutu, she felt she needed protection from him.*

This survivor was part of the first of many training sessions my associateLaurie Anne Pearlman and I conducted in Rwanda between 1999 and 2007with Rwandan survivors. These sessions covered the origins and effects of geno-cide, and avenues to prevention and reconciliation. We have also developed on-

Rwandan survivors who participated in a

training session conducted by Ervin Staub

and Laurie Anne Pearlman.


going educational radio programs, in collabo-ration with a Dutch NGO, La Benevolencija.The interview I described, in which the survivorspoke of her experience during the genocide,appeared to be healing for her. In the trainingshe was quiet and withdrawn, looking downcastin photos. A year later, we reassembled thegroup to find out what use they had made of thetraining. Now she was much more active, outfront in describing the benefits of the trainingand the way she used it. A year had passed withintervening experiences, but this change in heris consistent with the potential benefits of testi-mony. As part of our training, we also had par-ticipants gather in small groups in which theycould talk about their experiences during thegenocide. Evaluations of our training revealedmany benefits, including a decrease in traumasymptoms, not only in the people we trainedbut also in people some of them later trained.But the change in this woman stood out.

One avenue to healing is people describing

painful experiences. Even writing about suchexperiences for a short time has significant ben-eficial effects. Talking about intensely painfulevents to empathic listeners is especially heal-ing. Since a usual aspect of victimization andtrauma is that the person who has been harmedhad no control over what was done to him orher, it is important that the person talking aboutsuch experiences has control over pace and con-tent. This can be the case in testimony.

While earlier research has focused on thedeleterious effects of having been victimized,many people who have been greatly harmed ei-ther help others who have been harmed orwork to prevent harm. I have called this altru-ism born of suffering. Some people, havingsuffered, don’t want others to suffer.

There are numerous examples. Many Holo-caust survivors have worked to prevent geno-cide at other places, or create more justsocieties, or work in social service professions.A woman who came from a terrible back-ground of deprivation, abandonment, and rapestarted an orphanage in Vietnam for the aban-doned and often despised children of Americansoldiers. With one of my students, JohannaVollhardt, now a professor, we found in re-

search that studied other matters, including theeffect of the Holocaust on survivors, evidenceabout altruism born of suffering. In a study weconducted, somewhat to my surprise, we foundthat students who reported that they have suf-fered because of their group membership orharm done to them in their families were on theaverage more caring and helpful than those whosaid they had not suffered. So altruism born ofsuffering does not seem a rare phenomenon.

What might contribute to this? Healing frompsychological wounds is important. Since en-gagement with one’s experience under support-ive conditions is essential to healing, testimonycan be both healing and a starting point for ajourney toward further healing experiences.Testimony can be given to a listener or inter-viewer, or in front of a supportive group, as inthe case of groups of Holocaust survivors meet-ing all over the United States, or survivorsmeeting in a group and giving testimony at Sol-ace ministries in Rwanda.

In a country like Rwanda, where everyone iswounded to some degree, people empathicallylistening to one another—something we advo-cate through the examples of the behavior ofcharacters in our radio drama in Rwanda,Musekeweya (“New Dawn”)—is an important av-enue to community healing. Evaluations haveshown that this ongoing and highly popularradio drama, which started to be broadcast in2004, has had a variety of benefits, such as in-creased empathy and people saying more whatthey believe. Commemorations can also be valu-able for healing, especially when, in addition toremembering the painful past, they point to ahopeful future.

Testimony can also make “knowing but notknowing” less likely. Children and others in afamily sometimes know that terrible things havehappened to their parents or family members,but with survivors remaining silent, they don’tknow much more. This adversely affects them.Having given testimony, people are more likelyto talk about what has happened, and do it in abalanced manner appropriate for children,grandchildren, and other family members.

Having received help at the time of sufferingseems to contribute to later altruism. Having

been rescued, or even given limited help likefood, can say to a person that there is kindnessin the world and that the world does not haveto be as the perpetrators made it to be. Havingbeen able to act in one’s own or in others’ be-half—which intended victims of genocideoften do not have a possibility to do—can alsocontribute by empowering a person. In onestudy Holocaust survivors in Israel who re-ported that they were both helped, and wereable to act in their own or their family’s behalf,were more likely to engage in activities aimedat making peace with Palestinians.

Receiving support, care, and affection afterone has suffered matters a great deal. Somespecialists in psychological trauma say thattrauma is, in part the experience of harmfulevents, in part what happens afterward. Finally,love and care before traumatic events can makea person more resilient. Perhaps the resilienceof many Jewish survivors of the Holocaust isthe result of loving families. Both can con-tribute to altruism born of suffering.

Such altruism is of great importance. Sincewe have a world that inflicts suffering on manypeople, without experiences that transform suf-fering into caring, people can be increasinglyalienated from or hostile toward others. It is im-portant both to help people who have suffered,and for people to join together to work to createsocieties that do not harm their members.

There is commonality in the influences thatlead to genocide. There is also commonality inhow people are affected by extreme violence.By showing this, testimony can demonstrateour common humanity. Through that, it can,in turn, advance empathy and caring for allhuman beings.

*I described the essential elements of this story as I was told but changedsome details for the sake of confidentiality.

Aegis Trust Rwanda with USC Shoah Foundation,Radio La Benevolencija, and The Institute of Re-search and Dialogue for Peace launched theRwanda Peace Education Program in December2013. The program, supported by the Swedish Inter-national Development and Cooperation Agency inRwanda for three years, intends to develop PeaceEducation in Rwanda through activities includingradio programs, artistic exhibitions, archive build-ing, and education workshops. To learn more pleasevisit: http://sfi.usc.edu/ourwork/rwanda.

“Testimony can also make ‘knowing but not knowing’ less likely. Childrenand others in a family sometimes know that terrible things have happenedto their parents or family members, but with survivors remaining silent,they don’t know much more. This adversely affects them. Having given testimony, people are more likely to talk about what has happened, and do it in a balanced manner appropriate for children, grandchildren, and other family members.”

Ervin Staub is professor emeritus and founding di-

rector of the doctoral program in the psychology of

peace and violence at the University of Massachu-

setts at Amherst. For a full biography, see page 6.

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THERE ARE TWO REMAINING synagogues in thecity of Piotrków Tribunalski which together nowserve as the city’s public library. Piotrków was thecity where the Nazis established the first modernghetto one month after the fall of Poland in Octo-ber 1939. The synagogues were desecrated, used

as stables and assembly points before mass shootings. The last inhabitants ofthe ghetto not sent for forced labor were murdered in the temples.

In the smaller of the two synagogues, patrons or visitors can still see, behindthe metal stacks of children’s books, remains of the original Aron Kodesh paint-ing and decoration riddled with bullet marks. In the great synagogue, next door,the library also provides computers and Internet access. It is on these comput-ers that members of the public may be given a chance to view and listen to tes-timonies from the Institute’s Visual History Archive about what happened inthat very place—and to whom it happened—and through the connection be-tween the individual stories and the place itself, there is opportunity to fill atleast a fraction of the void visible throughout the city.

It Happened Here, Right HereBy Kim Simon, Martin Šmok, and Andrea SzőnyiReturning to the places where events occur can

add levels of context to testimony

Educators participating in the Institute's Teaching

with Testimony in the 21st Century program dur-

ing a visit to the main deportation center for Jews

in the Czech Republic.

testimony on Location

In the first five years of its existence, theShoah Foundation engaged in a large-scale ef-fort to collect testimonies in, at its height, 30countries simultaneously. This simultaneityclarified for all involved, the innate and contin-ual cycle of local-to-global practice. The collect-ing of testimonies in cities such as Los Angeles,Caracas, Miami, Paris, Vilnius, Kyiv, Johannes-burg, and Sydney in 24-hour daily and weeklysuccession allowed the Institute not only tobuild the Visual History Archive but also toglimpse and appreciate the specificity of theplaces, communities, context, and individualswho had the courage to share their life stories.

The genocide of European Jewry—and thoselabeled as Jews by the racist laws—created avoid that is still felt on many levels. Entire com-munities were wiped out, Jewish quartersabandoned and often leveled, synagogues des-ecrated. Paradoxically, the former existence ofthese communities remains almost touchable:buildings designed, city districts built, factoriesand theaters set up and operated, sports clubsfounded by the people whose very existence isnow forgotten. Additionally, the sites of severalstages of the eradication of these people arestill there: local ghettos, various places whereJews were concentrated before deportations,train stations, hiding places, and in many caseseven killing sites.

Using testimony and working with local part-ners serve to deconstruct the notion of a sepa-rate, “Jewish” narrative being externally forcedand applied, by working to reveal together, thehistory of local Jewish populations, which is anintegral part of national history, in particular lo-cations. By bringing local personal stories backto the local sites through the use of the testi-monies at those sites, it is possible to disrupt theawkward silence that lives on in these spaces.While unable to fill the void, it at least begins toaddress a gap in social historical memory.

The Visual History Archive, with its capacityto search, retrieve, and view testimonies, pro-vides an endless opportunity to explore thedepth and breadth of when something oc-curred and where it occurred. With such a vasttrove of individual memories, this periscopicvision orients the viewer—the learner—to abase line of context from which the rest of atestimony “reading” can follow.

The level at which a testimony piece can belocalized may include a city, a village, a street,or a school where life trajectories are explored.Dr. Monika Mezei, a history teacher atBerzsenyi High School in Budapest, is able tochoose a clip of testimony from a former pupil,Tom Lantos, who went on to become a U.S. cit-


izen and congressman from California. She isable to choose a particular clip of Rep. Lantos(who passed away in 2008), who describes withhumor and great detail his experience in hisLatin class in 1943, learning specific skills andtricks to memorize a particular aspect of the les-son. The students in her Latin class today canview and study this clip together with otherclips, either by itself or within a larger lesson.

This clip, just an example of so many, in mul-tiple languages, provides a small glimpse intothe immediacy and specificity of connection tohistory and memory in a particular context. Thestudents are drawn in by the connection to theircurrent space and experience, the relevancesparking further interest and questions, alongwith an opportunity for further knowledge. Theyare invited to dig deeper and to considerwhether or how the history and experience ofthat individual are relevant. The outcomes of thelesson are larger, surrounding the analysis of pri-mary sources, the knowledge of specific events ofthe Holocaust in Hungary, and the understand-ing of various individuals within a particular timeand place, but Mezei’s path to these educationaloutcomes is covered by the specific and localizedtouch points geared toward her group of students.

Because of the indelibility of the testimony,there is a chance that the knowledge, the histor-ical information, the critical thinking, and socialemotional learning gained will remain with stu-dents long after the class is over. This local ap-proach provides educators and students today,and for the future, an opportunity to go beyondthe surface, to participate and contribute activelyin their own learning. The relevance and partic-ularity are partially established through connec-tion of place, and the distance of time collapsesbecause of the story’s universality.

By providing educators and students withlocal personal accounts, technology to accessthem, and educational scaffolding to make themrelevant and meaningful, there is an opportu-nity to facilitate the understanding of history—and future—as a sum of individual human livesbeing lived, to contribute to a generational shift,not only a commitment today or the next fiveyears but a commitment for the long term.

testimony Around the World

The Aladdin Project, which was founded in 2008,aims to dam the spread of Holocaust denial, anti-Semitism, and racism in the Muslim world, and si-multaneously erect bridges to renew relations between

Jews and Muslims. Founder Anne-Marie Revcolevschi reflects on her journey to turnthe symbol of Aladdin’s lamp as a tool of magic into a symbol of knowledge, stemmingignorance, obfuscation, and extremism.

IT ALL BEGAN WITH THE VIRULENTLY anti-Semitic and revisionist statementsby Iran’s then-president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his hate speech againstIsrael, which dramatically worsened the already tense relations between Jewsand Muslims, not only in the Middle East and North Africa, but also in Europeand North America. It was then that I discovered, to my utter dismay, thatnone of the classic texts on the Holocaust had been translated either into Ara-bic or Persian. Time was of the essence, as the tide of hatred grew, and so to-gether with an esteemed group of colleagues, including Simone Veil and Davidde Rothschild, we tackled the problem head-on and began to translate and dis-tribute translations. Essential to this effort was building an international net-work of intellectuals and political figures, the majority of them hailing fromMuslim cultures, on the basis of shared values and common objectives.

The response to our initial activities vindicated the underlying assumptionof our endeavor: that sharing knowledge and education can transcend differ-ences and reconcile people. Today the Aladdin Project’s multilingual websiteis in five languages and has received hundreds of thousands of visitors; morethan 80,000 copies of our 18 books in Arabic and Persian, including The Diaryof Anne Frank, If This Is a Man by Primo Levi, and The Destruction of the Euro-pean Jews by Raul Hilberg, have been downloaded from Aladdin Online Li-brary, showing that readers, users, and especially the younger generations arewilling to learn when given the opportunity.

Encouraged by these results and supported by a large number of Europeanand international personalities, in 2010 we decided to move closer to Muslimpublic opinion and organized an unprecedented series of conferences aboutthe Holocaust in 10 cities: Cairo, Casablanca, Rabat, Baghdad, Erbil, Istanbul,Jerusalem, Nazareth, Tunis, and Amman. Several thousands of people at-tended these meetings, listening to an array of speakers that included historianand Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld, filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, peace activistAli El Samman, veteran diplomat Jacques Andréani, and the king of Morocco’sadviser André Azoulay, among others. Reading Primo Levi in these placeschanges the landscape of learning and dialogue in the Middle East.

Anne-Marie Revcolevschi is the president of the

Aladdin Project. For a full biography, see page 6.

Building Dams and BridgesBy Anne-Marie RevcolevschiHow The Aladdin Project uses the power of words to create

bonds between Jewish and Muslim worlds

“Through the connection betweenthe individual stories and the placeitself, there is opportunity to fill atleast a fraction of the void.”

For biographies of Kim Simon, Martin Šmok,

and Andrea Szőnyi, see page 6.


Books, however powerful as a medium, don’ttell the whole story; we also wanted to conveneopinionmakers. In 2011 we took 200 political,civic, and religious leaders, mostly from the Mid-dle East and Africa but also from Asia, the UnitedStates, and Europe, to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Onthe ruins of the gas chambers, the Grand Muftiof Bosnia sent this solemn message to deniers inthe Muslim world: “Not in our name!” It was apowerful moment when against all expectationsof a few years earlier, ecumenical prayers in He-brew by Chief Rabbi Meir Lau of Israel, in Frenchby the Archbishop of Paris, Cardinal AndréVignt-Trois, and in Arabic by the Grand MuftiMustafa Ceric, echoed on the silent, snow-cov-ered plain, while former German ChancellorGerhard Schröder called the world to peace.

The rise of political Islam and its associatedracism, and the outbreak of domestic and in-ternational crises complicated our task. Yet thisis precisely the time to act: Young people andthose yearning for freedom in the countries ofthe so-called “Arab Spring” want to learn aboutthe world around them and be able to share thevalues of freedom and respect for others.

It was then that we turned to add film to ourgrowing catalogue of content. We began bytranslating Lanzmann’s masterpiece documen-tary, Shoah, into Turkish and Persian, and tele-cast the film for the first time in Turkey andIran. More than 10 million viewers watched themovie, which was broacast by Turkey’s nationaltelevision channel, TRT, and the Los Angeles-based, Persian-language Pars TV. Many viewersin Iran contacted Pars TV to express their sur-prise and incomprehension: How could this re-ality be denied by their leaders?

Reaching deeper into higher education is partof a strategy to maintain high-level learning anddialogue. Under the leadership of Executive Di-rector Abe Radkin, who organized Aladdin’s firstsummer university at the University of Basheçe-hir in Istanbul in partnership with 16 prestigiousuniversities in Europe, the Middle East, Africa,and the United States, 56 American, African,Arab, European, Israeli, Iranian, and Turkishstudents worked together on the history of massviolence in 20th-century Europe and the chal-lenges facing European societies today. They at-tended conferences with lecturers from aroundthe world, which offered a unique opportunityfor bright young people from different countriesand cultures to focus on the causes of the Holo-caust, the consequences of hatred, and rejectionof the “other,” the transition of a Europe tornapart by two world wars to peace and reconcilia-tion. The graduates of the summer universitywere appointed “Youth Ambassadors for Peace

and Intercultural Dialogue” and in April 2013,the best groups were recognized for their re-search by the Aladdin Award at the EuropeanParliament. The next Aladdin university will beheld this summer in Berlin.

To sustain this drive for education in theMuslim world, the training of teachers is a pri-ority. In November 2013, in cooperation withthe United States Holocaust Memorial Mu-seum, Aladdin organized the first internationaltraining seminar on the Holocaust for teachersand scholars of the Muslim world.

In the Muslim world, where people face therealities of violence and extremism, it requiresstrength and determination to work toward ourobjectives. In truth, my trust is based on theknowledge that I was born in Paris in 1943 andonly survived thanks to the courage of a Frenchfamily that hid me and my mother. Thosesmall points of light never stopped flickering

during the dark days of the Nazi period. Nowthe light of knowledge, the source of Aladdin’slamp, guides our way, as we put up dams andbuild bridges in dark times all over again. Thetestimonies of the USC Shoah Foundation area part of that same light of knowledge, whichwe hope to share in the languages of the Mus-lim world together, inspired by the same desirefor truth among peoples of different culturesand religions.

USC Shoah Foundation’s Executive DirectorStephen D. Smith was keynote speaker at Aladdin’steacher’s seminar in Istanbul. A joint project withAladdin to transcribe and translate USC ShoahFoundation's audio-visual testimony into severallanguages of the Middle East is now under way, in-cluding testimony about Auschwitz, which was usedduring this year’s International Holocaust Remem-brance Day on January 27.

The Aladdin Project (Left to right) Professor Mohamed Dajani from Al Quds University, president of Watasia Organisation; Dr. Mustafa Ceric, (Grand Mufti of Bosnia); and Sheik Khamis Abda, presi-dent of the Palestinian Imams (Palestinian territories), walking under a gates at Auschwitz-Birkenau

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In Conversation withXu Xin and Yehuda BauerTwo of the world’s leading Holocaust schol-ars—one based in China, the other in Israel—met for the first time in a conversation at theUSC Shoah Foundation; it was moderated byExecutive Director Stephen D. Smith. Xu Xindescribed the relatively recent introduction ofHolocaust studies to China and said that theHolocaust could be used to broaden China’sstudy of its own history, which includes the1937 Nanjing massacre. Yehuda Bauer said hebelieves Holocaust studies must include both“text” and “context”—to understand the factsas well as the conditions that lead to genocide.Xu and Bauer agreed that there is still muchwork to be done in Holocaust studies.

To view the conversation, visit http://sfi.usc.edu/presentations. Read Xu’s article about Holo-caust studies in China on page 11 of this issue.

Smith Named UNESCO Chairon Genocide EducationStephen D. Smith has been named the inau-gural UNESCO Chair on Genocide Education.USC and the United Nations Educational, Sci-entific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)worked together to establish the chair. Smithwill collaborate with genocide researchers andeducators around the world to develop educa-tor training and multidisciplinary programsthat foster learning about the causes and ef-fects of mass violence. In conjunction with theInstitute, he will also organize internationalconferences, teach, and contribute to the con-tinued study of genocide and genocide educa-tion in order to promote international dialogueand collaboration.

Clockwise from top left: Holocaust scholars Xu Xin (left) and Yehuda Bauer (center) join Institute Executive Director Stephen D. Smith during a visit to USC; Institute senior international consultant and regional repre-sentative in Hungary Andrea Szőnyi; during a visit to the Institute by the president of Rwanda are (from left)Permanent Representative to the United Nations Eugène Gasana, Aegis Trust staff members Aude Kamanzi andMedy Kimenyi, Institute Executive Director Stephen D. Smith, Rwanda President Paul Kagame, Institute con-sultant Edith Umugiraneza, Rwandan Ambassador to the United States Mathilde Mukantabana, Institute staffmember Consolée Uwamariya, and Aegis Trust staff member Paul Rukesha; Institute founder Steven Spielberg.


Spring 2014

News&Events

Steven Spielberg Speaks at U.N.Institute founder Steven Spielberg deliveredthe keynote speech at the United Nations’ In-ternational Holocaust Memorial Day ceremonyon Jan. 27. Spielberg said of using testimonyto prevent genocide, “When testimony and wit-ness form the basis of policy; when truth,rather than narrow national or local interests,forms the foundation for action, there is greatcause to hope for resolution of what appear tobe unsolvable problems.”

This year’s ceremony, held at U.N. head-quarters in New York City, also featured re-marks by United States Ambassador to theUnited Nations Samantha Power and Holo-caust survivor Rena Finder, musical perform-ances by the 92nd Street Y Woodwind Quintet,and prayers recited by Cantor Shmuel Barzilai.The ceremony is an annual commemorationof the victims of the Holocaust, that coincideswith the anniversary of the liberation ofAuschwitz.

To view the speech, visit http://www.un.org/en/holocaustremembrance/2014/webcast.shtml

Peace Over Violence AwardThe Los Angeles–based nonprofit Peace OverViolence honored the USC Shoah Foundationwith the Media Award at its 42nd Annual Hu-manitarian Awards at the Beverly Hills Hotelon October 25, 2013. Peace Over Violence is ded-icated to intervention, prevention, education,and advocacy for victims of abuse and violence.It chose to honor the USC Shoah Foundationfor its work researching and highlighting sexualviolence in genocide, and called the Institute “abeacon in the quest to preserve history throughremembrance and storytelling.”

Institute Work Flourishesin RwandaPresident Paul Kagame of Rwanda visited theUSC Shoah Foundation to learn more aboutthe Institute’s work linking testimony, technol-ogy, and education in Rwanda. The Institutehosted three staff members from Aegis TrustRwanda this spring for training on indexingmethodology and archive building to preservetestimonies of Rwandan Tutsi genocide sur-vivors. Through a joint project, in partnershipwith Aegis Trust Rwanda, IWitness in Rwandalaunched six classroom pilots in and aroundKigali, led by educators trained on the Insti-tute’s multimedia educational website.

In addition, University of Southern Californiaundergraduates will travel to Rwanda again thissummer to learn about post-genocide recon-struction as part of the Problems Without Pass-ports course.

To see more about the Institute’s work inRwanda, visit http://sfi.usc.edu/ourwork/rwanda

Restoring Testimonieswith New Software USC Shoah Foundation’s technology staff hasdeveloped new software to restore Visual His-tory Archive tapes that were previously thoughtto be unfixable. Due to faulty recording equip-ment, these 20-year-old tapes had seriousaudio and visual problems that could not becorrected efficiently with existing restorationmethods. The Institute developed new image-recognition software, inspired by Google’s Pi-casa tool, that restores the videos using almostno manual labor. They hope to go into produc-tion with the system this year.

To learn more, visit http://sfi.usc.edu/videorestoration

Teaching with Testimonyin Europe

USC Shoah Foundation’s flagship professionaldevelopment program, Teaching with Testi-mony in the 21st Century, has now been held inHungary, Poland, France, Ukraine, and CzechRepublic. Secondary-school educators apply tobe part of the yearlong program, which pre-pares teachers to use testimony from the VisualHistory Archive as a basis for classroom lessonsand activities that build multiple literacies,strengthen critical thinking skills, and promoteresponsible participation in civil society. Partic-ipants have created lessons that utilize testi-mony—especially of survivors and witnessesfrom their local region—to teach about litera-ture, racism, government, and more.

To find out more about the most recent Teaching with Testimony program in Poland,visit http://sfi.usc.edu/2014-polish-workshop

Testimony Exhibit in Parisand OnlineThe World UNESCO headquarters in Paris dis-played a five-part exhibit of testimony from theVisual History Archive, Journeys Through theHolocaust, to commemorate International Dayof Commemoration in Memory of the Victimsof the Holocaust in January and February. Theexhibit featured video screens playing testi-mony clips (in English and French) that coverfive aspects of journeys, both literal and figu-rative, through the Holocaust: flight, deporta-tion, liberation, immigration, and aftermath.

To view the exhibit, visit http://sfi.usc.edu/journeys-through-holocaust

When George Clooney accepted the 2013 USC Shoah Foundation’sAmbassador for Humanity Award in October, he joined the ranks of other am-bassadors who have supported the Institute’s efforts to promote tolerance andrespect through the use of testimonies in its Visual History Archive in the 20years since it was founded. Institute founder Steven Spielberg presentedClooney with the award—the Institute’s highest honor—at a gala in New York.TNT was the presenting sponsor. Comedian Jon Stewart hosted with specialguest Sandra Bullock. Norah Jones was the musical performer for the evening.

“He is an unparalleled example of action over apathy—someone who, likewhat we do here, documents the bad with good intentions—someone whotruly knows that without action, our humanitarian efforts would be nothingmore than words,” Spielberg said.

Spielberg noted that Clooney helped found Not on Our Watch, which seeks toprevent future atrocities. Clooney also established the Satellite Sentinel Project,which monitors violence and human-rights abuses in Sudan and South Sudan.

Clooney’s humanitarian efforts reach into other areas as well: He has alsohelped organize aid to victims of the 2010 Haitian earthquake and has beennamed a United Nations Messenger of Peace.

Spielberg said that Clooney isn’t looking for publicity when he joins thefight to helping others. “He said something that is at the core of the USCShoah Foundation,” Spielberg recalled. “He said, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if evenwithout the spotlight, we were steadfast to help those in need?’ George is thebest kind of humanitarian. He is a humble humanitarian.”

In accepting the award, Clooney said the Institute is doing an important jobin keeping global atrocities in the news. But he also maintained that the worldwould be a better place if such organizations didn’t need to exist.

“It’s really hard for bad things to happen inbright light. We have to continue to fight thisfight, and the best way to do it, we find, is byshining a light on atrocities,” Clooney said.

USC Shoah Foundation Executive DirectorStephen D. Smith talked about the growth ofthe Institute since Spielberg established it in1994 after making the Academy Award–win-ning film, Schindler’s List.

“Through the USC Shoah Foundation, thelegacy of your film, Steven, you gave the chancefor many lights to shine in full color,” Smithsaid. “It’s your vision. We’re changing theworld through testimony—through the powerof the human story.”

Bob Katz, the gala co-chairman and chair-man of the Institute’s Board of Councilors, toldthe audience that the gala was the most suc-

George ClooneyAn Ambassador for HumanityThe multifaceted filmmaker and human rights activist

receives the Institute’s highest honor.


News & events

cessful yet, bringing in nearly $3.7 million.While thanking everybody involved in makingthe event a success, including Benefit Commit-tee chair members Ulrika and Joel Citron,Leesa Willett, and Leon Wagner, along with thevice chair members, including Initiative Chair-man Steve Cozen and his wife, Sandy, Katzheld special praise for Spielberg.

“I want to thank him for inspiring everyonewho has been drawn to the vibrant promise ofthe Shoah Foundation during our 20 years ofexistence, and for the vision and creative en-ergy to imagine, motivate and actuate this

unique endeavor in the first place so we couldeven be drawn to it,” Katz said.

Previous recipients of the Ambassadors forHumanity Award are Robert A. Iger, chairmanand CEO, The Walt Disney Co., 2012; Brian L.Roberts, chairman and CEO, Comcast Corp.,2011; Jeffrey Katzenberg, chairman and CEO,DreamWorks Animation, 2010; Kirk Douglas,actor and humanitarian, 2008; Wallis Annen-berg, chairwoman, Annenberg Foundation,2007; Bill Clinton, former United States Pres-ident, 2005; Richard Lovett, president, CreativeArtists Agency, 2004; Jerry Breslauer, Bruce

Ramer and Mickey Rutman, USC Shoah Foun-dation founding board members, 2002; EricH. Greenberg, president and CEO, Beautifull,Inc., 2001; Rena Rowan, founder, Jones Ap-parel Group, and Severin Wunderman, chair-man, Corum Swiss Time Pieces, 2001; andHoward Marks, artist, philanthropist, chair-man and cofounder of Oaktree Capital Man-agement, and his wife, Nancy, 2000.

To view photographs and videos from previous Am-bassadors for Humanity events visit: sfi.usc.edu/afh


(Clockwise from top left) George Clooney; Sandra Bullock; Norah Jones; George Clooney, Steven Spielberg, and Jon Stewart; the Milstein Family Hall of Ocean Life atthe American Museum of Natural History in New York; USC President C. L. Max Nikias (left), event co-chair and Chairman of the Institute's Board of CouncilorsRobert Katz, Niki C. Nikias, and George Clooney; USC Shoah Foundation Executive Director Stephen D. Smith; Steven Spielberg (left), George Clooney, Rwandangenocide survivor Freddy Mutanguha, USC Shoah Foundation Chief Technology Officer Samuel Gustman, Stephen D. Smith.

USC Shoah Foundation – e Institute for Visual History and Education has dedicated 20 years to collecting

and sharing the testimonies of those who survived and witnessed the Holocaust and other genocides. But the story

behind the Institute has mostly gone untold.

Released to commemorate the Institute’s 20th anniversary,Testimony: e Legacy of Schindler’s List and the USC

Shoah Foundation tells that story and more.

Part I of the book chronicles the making of the Academy Award-winning Schindler’s List and how Steven Spielberg arrived at the

decision to collect testimonies from Holocaust survivors.

Part II details the race against time, as the team Spielberg assembled worked to collect more than 50,000 testimonies around

the world, how the Institute quickly grew to become the largest resource of its kind, and how it uses its collection in innovative

ways to teach the lessons of tolerance and respect.

Testimony is available online and in stores now. Proceeds will benefit the USC Shoah Foundation.

e Untold Story Behind the Institute

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How you can make a differenceOne person really can make a difference. If you would like to support the USC Shoah Foundation, here are some of the ways you can help.

Planned Gifts: Planned gifts include wills, charitable remainder trusts, charitable lead trusts, and annuities, and may help you reduce or avoid income, gift, and inheritance taxes.

Cash Donations: Gifts may be made by cash, check, or credit card.

Pledges:Make a gift that is paid over several years, on a payment schedule that is most convenient for you.

Memorial or Tribute Gifts:Honor special occasions such as birthdays, weddings, or births; memorialize a friend or family member; send a tribute card from the Institute announcing the gift.

In-Kind Gifts: Donate goods or services that fulfill programmatic needs.

For more information, contact: Nicole Watkins, Director of Donor Relations USC Shoah FoundationThe Institute for Visual History and EducationUniversity of Southern California650 W. 35th Street, Suite 114Los Angeles, CA 90089-2571Phone: (213) 740-6001 E-mail: [email protected]

To donate online visit:https://sfi.usc.edu/support

PastForward Spring 2014

USC Shoah Foundation is dedicated to making audio-visual testimonies with survivors and other witnesses of the Holocaust and other genocides a compelling voice for education and action.

Stay in TouchBegin receiving periodic updates and information alerting you to special events in your community, new programs, and the latest Institute news. Send an email to [email protected] “pastforward” in the subject line and your name and address in the body.

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voices from the visual history archive...

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