USC Shoah Foundation
The Shoah Foundation or Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation or Shoah Visual History Foundation, was established by Steven Spielberg in 1994, one year after completing the Academy Award-winning film Schindler's List. The original aim of the foundation was to record testimonies of all of the remaining survivors of the Holocaust (which in Hebrew is called the Shoah) as a collection of videotaped interviews.
The foundation proceeded to collect over 50,000 interviews over the next few years. Testimonies were received from many different survivors, including Jewish, homosexual, Jehovah's Witness, Sinti and Roma survivors, political prisoners, and survivors of the eugenics policy.
In addition to survivor testimony, interviews were also conducted with rescuers, aid providers, liberators, witnesses and participants in war crimes trials.
As of 2001, the foundation announced its new mission: "To overcome prejudice, intolerance, and bigotry and the suffering they cause through the educational use of the Foundation's visual history testimonies."
Notable features of the Shoah Foundation are the online exhibitions:
Online exhibitions
Surviving Auschwitz - Five Personal Journeys
Organized around an interactive map of the world that traces the survivors’ paths on five continents, Surviving Auschwitz: Five Personal Journeys demonstrates how the shared experience of the holocaust affected individuals from very diverse cultures. This dynamic educational tool—geared to students in grades 8 through 12 and the general public utilizes four hours of testimony video clips from the Shoah Foundation’s archive, more than any other online exhibit on www.vhf.org.
Voices of the Holocaust - Children Speak
This online exhibit features testimonies and interactive elements to engage younger students ages 11 to 14 in the exploration of history from the perspective of four Holocaust survivors who were also that age during WWII Enter Voices of the Holocaust online exhibition
Survivors - Testimonies of the Holocaust
The testimonies of Holocaust survivors Bert, Paula, Silvia, and Sol, are presented in short chronological segments, with interactive features that help high school students place each personal story in a historical and geographical context. Enter Testimonies of the Holocaust online exhibition
Testimony Segments for the classroom
Request up to 30 minutes of unedited testimony segments on one VHS tape, designated specifically for classroom use. Learn more
View Testimonies Online
The Shoah Foundation has developed the Online Testimony Viewer which makes segments of English-language testimonies related to particular themes and time periods available to students and educators. Watch testimonies
Documentaries and other works
- Survivors of the Holocaust, 1996
- The Lost Children of Berlin, 1997 [ Edward R. Murrow Award ]
- Survivors: Testimonies of the Holocaust; Educational CD-ROM, 1998
- The Last Days, 1998 [ Academy Award ]
- Erinnern für Gegenwart und Zukunft (Remembering for the Present and the Future); German Educational CD-ROM, 1999
- Broken Silence; Series of five foreign-language documentaries, 2000
- Remembering Ośwęicim, 2000
- One Human Spirit, 2003