International Women's Day

Today is International Women’s Day and this year we are honoring girls—from Holocaust Europe to Africa, from Central America to the Middle East, from occupied China to pre-war Armenia—who demonstrated extraordinary strength and resilience in the face of unimaginable horrors. Here is a selection of USC Shoah Foundation clips and films to mark the occasion.

Fifteen-year-old Eva Schloss describes the range of emotions that accompanied her liberation from Auschwitz by Red Army soldiers in 1945. 

Celina Biniaz, a “Schindler Jew,” remembers when she was 14 hearing about the end of the war while listening to an underground radio at the munitions factory set up by Oskar Schindler in the Brünnlitz concentration camp in Czechoslovakia.

Grace and Vanessa is a short documentary about a 10-year old Rwandan girl who risks her life to save a Tutsi baby and raises her as her own.

Music Dreams is an animated short film telling the story of Lisa Jura, a young Holocaust survivor who in 1938 escaped from Vienna to London on the Kindertransport.

Ruth: A Little Girl’s Big Journey tells the story of Ruth Westheimer’s escape as a young Jewish girl from the dangers of Nazi Germany. Narrated by Dr. Ruth herself, the film speaks to many of the universal themes faced by young people today.

Watch this clip from Helen Fagin's testimony, in which she recalls that as a girl herself she resisted Nazi prohibitions against schooling by teaching other Jewish children in the Radomsko Ghetto in Poland.