This exhibition features 11 large-scale color digital photographs of Holocaust survivors and their descendants and an accompanying 12-and-a-half-minute video. The photographs originally accompanied a Journal News/Lohud feature story about the impact of their parents’ and grandparents’ experiences on the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors.  The project asked: “How do you talk about the most painful and formative experiences imaginable when those experiences occurred before you were born?” It suggested that, “with the number of Holocaust survivors dwindling that is one of the challenges facing their children and grandchildren as they take on the responsibility of reminding the world of the depths to which humanity is capable of descending.” In the video, “families of local Holocaust survivors discuss how a lifetime of hearing the experiences of their parents and grandparents has affected their own lives,” Harrison has written.

One of Harrison’s portrait subjects, Grace Bennett of Chappaqua, whose father is a survivor, “first learned of the Holocaust after seeing a film as a seven-year-old in school. She understood how her father got the tattooed number on his arm, and she started to ask him questions.” “The rest of her life has been about making sense of what happened,” according to Harrison. “I still have a lot of trouble, as does my Dad, processing how anybody can reduce themselves to such bestial behavior,” Bennett has said. “It’s incomprehensible.”

All of the participating families were located with the assistance of the Holocaust and Human Rights Education Center in White Plains, in particular its Generations Forward program, which helps second- and third-generation survivors learn how to share their loved ones’ stories, as well as the Holocaust Museum and Center for Tolerance and Education in Suffern.

At Hebrew Home, where residents include survivors, the exhibition will be particularly resonant. The Derfner Judaica Museum itself was founded by a German Jewish refugee committed to passing on stories told through treasured Jewish objects—from generation to generation.