Jun 14, 2023 | Paulette Shaw was born in London, England in 1916. Paulette grew up in Paris, where her father worked as a tailor.
On June 14, 1940, Nazi Germany invaded Paris. Jews were removed from their places of work, banned from entering many public spaces, and forced to wear yellow Star of David badges on their clothing to identify themselves. Over 13,000 Jews were later sent to concentration camps.
Paulette was imprisoned in the Besançon and Vittel internment camps in France. She was eventually released as part of a trade for the release of German citizens imprisoned abroad.
Jun 1, 2023 | “You have to have it within yourself, and whatever comes from the outside is secondary. You can cope with it, if you have someone you care for, if you have certain principles you abide by, and if you do what you feel is right and not what the world tells you to do. I think that’s more important than anything else.”
In the Theresienstadt ghetto, teenage Margot Heuman(n) entered a romantic relationship with a girl named Dita. After being deported to Auschwitz, Margot and Dita continued their romance in the camp, and survived together.
When Margot Heuman(n) told us her story in 1994, she censored the nature of her and Dita’s relationship. More than two decades later, Margot was able to come out to her family. Many online resources now cite Margot as being “the first queer Jewish woman known to have survived Nazi concentration camps” (Wikipedia contributors. "Margot Heumann." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 25 Mar. 2023. Web. 31 May. 2023).
To celebrate the first day of Pride Month, we honor LGBTQ+ survivors of the Holocaust, and recall how difficult living - and speaking - candidly was until recent years. In our Visual History Archive, which contains interviews with over 55,000 interviewees, only ~10 interviewees openly identify as queer in their interviews. Margot and Dita remained close until Dita’s passing in 2011.
Margot passed away in May 2022.
May 22, 2023 | Holocaust survivor Celina Biniaz was the youngest female on Oskar Schindler’s famed list. Celina survived the Kraków Ghetto, Nazi labor camps, and Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp before being rescued by Oskar Schindler, the German businessman who saved more than 1,000 Jews from the Holocaust.
Celina, 91, is a longtime friend of USC Shoah Foundation. Both Celina and her mother recorded testimony for USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive in 1996. For many years after the war, Celina was reluctant to share her story because she feared no one could comprehend what she had been through. That changed in 1994, when Steven Spielberg brought Oskar Schindler’s story to the screen with Schindler’s List and established Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, which later became USC Shoah Foundation.
Celina often says that “Oskar Schindler gave me life, but Steven Spielberg gave me a voice.” Some of Celina’s testimony was included as an extra feature on a DVD release of Schindler’s List, to help fight Holocaust denial. …
Nov 9, 2022 | "We had about three, four people standing outside watching if they see any police, or SS, or Nazis coming, to warn us so that we can escape from behind in the backyard. [...] In one corner were the burnt Torah scrolls. They were laying on the floor." For more than a year, Sigi Hart prepared for his November 1938 Bar Mitzvah, when he would mark his 13th birthday by reading from the Torah in his family’s synagogue in Berlin. A few days before his family and friends were to gather, his synagogue was burned down during Kristallnacht, also known as the November Pogroms. In this clip, Sigi describes celebrating his Bar Mitzvah amid the destruction.
The Kristallnacht Pogrom was an organized attack by military, police and civilians against Jews in Germany, Austria and parts of former Czechoslovakia (the Sudetenland) that occurred on November 9–10, 1938. Orchestrated by the Nazis in retaliation for the assassination of a German embassy official in Paris by a seventeen-year-old Jewish youth named Herchel Grynzspan, 1,400 synagogues and 7,000 businesses were destroyed, almost 100 Jews were killed, and 30,000 were arrested and sent to concentration camps. German Jews were subsequently held financially responsible for the destruction wrought upon their property during this pogrom.
May 1, 2012 • You are watching Lilian Saunders, a Jewish survivor from the Holocaust.
These videos are brought to us by the USC Shoah Foundation Institute, which was founded by Steven Spielberg in 1994. The Institute has video testimonies of 52,000 Holocaust survivors, witnesses, liberators, and others.
