Monday, May 12, 2025
Students from Lawrence High School currently have their artwork on display at the Holocaust Memorial & Tolerance Center of Nassau County, in Glen Cove.
The artwork is based off the life story of Rosalie Simon, a 93-year old Holocaust survivor. She was 12 during the Holocaust and was spared from the gas chamber by a guard at the Auschwitz concentration camp.
There are 14 pieces of artwork on display by students from 2002 to the present alongside the 20 that Ganes created. The exhibit is titled “Lest We Forget: Stories of Hope, Resistance and Survival, Retold Through Art” running from March 9 through the summer.
“By showing my artwork alongside the student projects, I strive to demonstrate the connection between my artistic practice and my teaching practice,” Ganes said. “Since there are fewer survivors alive today, giving my students an opportunity to meet with them directly feels more urgent, they are the last generation who will be able to hear live testimony.”
After a 20-year hiatus, Ganes revived her Adopt-a-Survivor program where students engage in conversations with survivors, held at the Irving Roth Holocaust Center, in Temple Judea of Manhasset.
“I wanted to bring the project back this year so the students could create art based on a survivor while they could still meet one as the probability has become increasingly rare,” Ganes said.
In December, the students met with Simon and listened to her story and took inspiration from her experiences.
Three seniors — Genesis Carranza, Mileena Dagrin and Heather McHale — created original works of art in response to the experience, while others composed poems and reflections.
Carranza’s artwork is titled “Rat, Pig, Venom” and portrays Simon living in the ghetto before taken to Auschwitz and a man dragged her into an alleyway and cut her hair.
“I was inspired by the fact that she was doing nothing and a man was bothered by her presence, defiling her in a way, it stuck with me a lot,” Carranza said.
She also wrote a poem called “Decency” depicting the scene she drew and other parts of her life.
Dagrin’s art features Simon inside the gas chamber with the guard looking at her then pulling her away and shows her reuniting with her sisters at the train station. Her piece is titled “Train to a Miracle.”
“I was inspired by the amount of times she mentioned that miracles helped her stay alive and hearing her talk about being reunited wit her sisters and that the train was her miracle escape stuck with me in a way that humanity still finds a way to shine through even in times of such horror,” Dagrin said.
McHale also expressed Simon being saved from the gas chamber but in a different way as she drew the guard handing her a striped dress and telling her to run, which led to the piece being called “Run.”
“In the background it has the entrance and in the front is the gas chamber, I have her coming out to the door of the gas chamber and the guard giving her a stripped dress,” McHale said. “When she told me that part, it made me realize how much that guard saved her life and she mentioned a red head and I am a red head so I thought it would be cool to do this part of the story.”
