USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education co-sponsored a March 7 lecture by Dr. Cathy J. Schlund-Vials on the memory work of Cambodian Americans whose films, memoirs, and music represent a largely unexamined site of critique on Cambodian memory in the aftermath of genocide.

I adored my father and admired him greatly. Harold Eisenberg was a good man in every sense of the word. He spoke about his life in Opatow, Poland before World War II and even his experience during the Holocaust, but he also lived very much in the present, working hard to provide for his family.  The business he started after the war became the foundation for much of our extended family’s success. I was named for his mother and his sister, who both perished in the Holocaust, and my father would often look at me tenderly and tell me how much I reminded him of his mother. 

For some people, hope is nothing but an airy dream. But for my parents, Elisabeth and George, it is a hard-won reality that they have lived every day of their lives. Their commitment is anything but naïve. They are both survivors of the Holocaust and have experienced anti-Semitism in all its forms. They’ve suffered more than most of us, God willing, will ever experience. And yet, their hope has been a source of redemption and new life.

Auschwitz should never have existed, so why are we so keen to cling onto it? Would it not be reasonable to scrub it from the landscape, remove the very thought of what it represents from our minds, recognize it as the cemetery it is, then grass it over and leave the dead to rest in peace?  

Anita Lasker-Wallfisch had a lucky moment while being processed at the Sauna in Auschwitz-Birkenau.  One of the girls processing her asked her what she did prior to landing in that place of unspeakable horror. “I played the cello,” she answered. That surreal conversation, not far from the gas chambers at Birkenau, would save her life.  As a member of the Auschwitz women's orchestra, playing the cello meant respite from heavy labor.  

“My father is Jewish.  My mother is Jewish. And I am Jewish.”  Those were the words I kept repeating to myself as I boarded my flight from JFK to attend the 70th anniversary commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Edith Umugiraneza was born and raised in Rwanda and survived the 1994 Rwandan Tutsi Genocide but lost most of her family including her mother. Edith wrote this poem not only as an ode to her mother but as a promise to continue her mother's work of helping others.

About a year after I joined USC Shoah Foundation, I was invited to be the keynote speaker at the Sarah and Chaim Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre’s Holocaust Education Week in Toronto. The theme that year was about memory and they had graciously invited me, the new Director of Education, to discuss memory in the context of the Institute’s education platform IWitness and testimony-based education.

“Oskar Schindler saved my life but Steven Spielberg gave me a voice,” Holocaust survivor Celina Biniaz.