On Monday, while accepting an honor from the University of Southern California, Steven Spielberg offered some words of warning as well as words of hope.

Following his speech at an event where he was honored for his work with the USC Shoah Foundation, which he established in 1994 with the purpose of recording and preserving interviews with Holocaust survivors and witnesses, the filmmaker who won an Academy Award was honored for his contributions to the organization.

During his time spent listening to the testimonies of survivors, Spielberg made the statement that “the echoes of history are unmistakable in our current climate.”

Spielberg has stated that radical viewpoints contribute to the creation of “a dangerous environment” and ultimately result in “a society that no longer celebrates differences.”

The words spoken by the great director were as moving as his works when they were at their most powerful, and a complete transcript of his remarks may be found here.

Other people who were honored at the ceremony were Celina Biniaz, who is 92 years old and is one of the few living Holocaust survivors from Oskar Schindler’s List. Due to the fact that her parents were employed by Schindler, a German industrialist who employed Jews to safeguard them from the Nazis, Biniaz was able to survive the concentration camp system. It was reported by the Los Angeles Times that she escaped the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp when she was thirteen years old.

Within the context of their Countering Antisemitism Through Testimony Collection effort, the Shoah Foundation has also been gathering the testimonies of those who survived the assaults that were carried out by Hamas in Israel in the month of October. “Both initiatives — recording interviews with survivors of the October 7 attacks and the ongoing collection of Holocaust testimony — seek to fulfill our promise to survivors: that their stories would be recorded and shared in the effort to preserve history and to work toward a world without antisemitism or hatred of any kind,” Spielberg said when the effort was announced in November. “Both initiatives are a part of our ongoing collection of Holocaust testimony.”

In the wake of his film “Schindler’s List,” which was released in 1993, Steven Spielberg established the USC Shoah Foundations. The chats that Spielberg had with survivors who came to visit the set of the film served as the impetus for him to start the organization, which is today an archive of more than 56,000 testimonials of eyewitness to the Holocaust and other crimes against humanity.