The Griffin Museum of Photography is honored to present the works of Beth Burstein, Loli Kantor and Max Hirshfeld in commemoration of this year’s International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The online exhibition, Holocaust Remembrance: Memory & Legacy, presents the projects of three second-generation Holocaust survivors, artists and documentarians whose works explore their unique experiences and familial histories and legacies.

We are thrilled to begin this journey with a poignant statement by Beth Burstein, who as a guest curator, states:

It has been eighty years since the end of World War II, with the last remaining Holocaust survivors now in their 80’s, 90’s, and some over 100 years of age. Time is running out to document their recollections as the victims and witnesses of unspeakable atrocities. For many survivors, the torch has now been passed onto their children, who can continue to tell these stories, as well as express how they have themselves been affected by their parents’ experiences. 

To commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day this year, I am honored to share my family’s story through my project 82598 (the number was my father’s “name” in a subcamp of Dachau.) Joining me are fellow second-generation photographers Loli Kantor and Max Hirshfeld. As children of survivors, we are in the unique position to tell our family histories visually, creatively, and perhaps most importantly, personally. In each of our projects, there are the shared experiences of tragic loss and erasure, searching for and mourning lost families, and honoring our parents. 

Today it is essential that our creative voices be heard. Who would imagine that in 2025 the Holocaust would still be denied, minimized, even glorified. The antisemitic slurs our parents heard growing up in wartime Europe are still being repeated. Holocaust history and testimony, especially personal stories like our own, must continue to be told to counteract this ignorance and misinformation. They can inform current generations, and those to come.

— Beth Burstein, January 2025

Beth Burstein | 82598

82598 is an ongoing photo series I began in 1997 when I first began to explore the experience of being the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, or “Second Generation.”  The experience of being ”2G” is something that has evolved and changed as I have gotten older. What began in my 20’s and 30’s with feelings of grief and longing, now has become an increased sense of urgency to tell my family’s story to ensure this part of our history is neither silenced nor denied, especially in the face of growing antisemitism worldwide.

This project, now it its 27^th year, began with a series of photographs of my father’s uniform which he saved after his liberation from a subcamp of Dachau. He held onto the uniform, which bears his identification number 82598, after liberation and then kept it in a bag on his closet shelf for many years. I had known about it from an early age, and it became my connection to a past that at the time felt unreal. When I knew his uniform was going on loan to the US Holocaust Museum in Washington DC in the late 1990’s, I wanted to photograph it before it left. While photographing, it struck me that it was quite small, something I had never noticed. It was not sized for the adult I knew my father to be, but for a child or a teenager, someone my height. Without thinking, I tried it on and it fit me perfectly. This was when it sank in that my father was just a slight boy of 15 when he was forced to wear this uniform.

Recently, I created three images using the few family photographs my grandfather managed to save and keep hidden throughout the time they were in forced labor at the concentration camp. After the war my grandfather had them made into photo-postcards to send to relatives in the United States, and they were eventually given to my father after he emigrated to the U.S.  I have looked at those images of my father’s family, with my grandfather’s written, heartbreaking messages on the reverse sides hundreds of times since I was a little girl. These, too, serve as my connection to people and a place that have felt inaccessible to me.

In these images I have placed my grandfather’s handwritten message on the front of each postcard as if it is bleeding through from the back side, making it necessary for the viewer to carefully read what is written on each card and uncover the jarring, tragic message each one reveals.

The second half of this “Legacy” project is my photo essay “I Thought It Would Feel Like Home,” which documents a 2005 pilgrimage I made with a small group of cousins to my father’s pre-Holocaust homeland of Lithuania. It combines my photographs from that journey with excerpts from journal entries written while I was there, with historical information about the Lithuanian Jews and their fate.

In documenting and writing about that journey I came face-to-face with the profound loss of a culture and its people, their erasure at the hands of others, and the “memories of memory” that are the only remnants I have to hold onto.

Loli Kantor | Selections from Call Me Lola and other projects

Deeply personal, my work speaks to the wider upheavals of the 20th and 21st centuries: love and loss, war and displacement, trauma and bereavement.

As a daughter of Holocaust survivors, I began my work in East-Central Europe in 2002. Initially, I was searching for clues about my own family, visiting my father and mother’s hometowns in Poland, exploring city archives, and seeking a deeper understanding of their histories. From 2005 to 2012, my focus shifted to a more universal perspective—investigating the lives of surviving Jews in Ukraine and Poland, as well as the non-Jews who were instrumental in preserving Jewish culture after the Holocaust and during the Soviet regime that followed. My work during this period centered on the Jewish presence and absence in these regions and was published in 2014 by the University of Texas Press.

Around 2014, I returned to my autobiographical work, delving into family archives and creating new pieces that explored my own story of loss—what I call “My own Holocaust.” This included the loss of my mother at birth, the loss of my father at the age of 14, displacement, and the untimely death of my brother. These experiences culminated in Call Me Lola: In Search of Mother, published by Hatje Cantz Verlag in 2024.

—Loli Kantor, January 2024

Loli Kantor is a photo-artist and documentarian whose work centers on personal, community, and cultural memory. Her works are long-term projects with a depth of content and context.

Kantor’s most recent project, Call Me Lola, surveys an extensive archive of family documents and photographs along with new photo-based work she has been making since 2004. Call Me Lola is an autobiographical exploration of the role of photography in shaping memory, identity, and the imagination. It includes self-portraits, archival family portraits and documents, as well as her own annotations on photographs that she made of ephemera, all interwoven with her photographs of present-day places and geographies related to her own family history in Poland, Germany, Ukraine, France, and Israel.

Her previous completed project centered on Jewish presence and cultural renewal in East-Central Europe, mostly focusing on Poland and Ukraine. As a daughter of Holocaust survivors, her work is deeply personal yet also speaks to current events. This project was published as a monograph entitled Beyond the Forest, Jewish Presence in Eastern Europe by the University of Texas Press in 2014. It followed a previously self-published artist’s book from 2009, There Was a Forest: Jewish Life in Eastern Europe Today, 2005-2008.

Kantor’s work is included in museum collections such as The Museum of Fine Arts (Houston, TX), Galicia Jewish Museum (Krakow, Poland), Lishui Museum of Photography (Lishui, China), and Lviv National Museum (Lviv, Ukraine).

Kantor was born in Paris, France, and raised in Israel. She has been living and working in Fort Worth, Texas, since 1984.

Max Hirshfeld | Sweet Noise: Love in Wartime

Sweet Noise: Love in Wartime is a book of photographs and words about the Holocaust, a subject difficult to grasp and almost impossible to document. It is also a story of love in a time of war, told in a clear voice using compelling black-and-white photographs and simple, evocative language to build a framework around this pivotal moment in history.

Hirshfeld’s parents, Polish Jews who survived Auschwitz, raised him in a small city in Alabama where life in the South of the 1950s and ‘60s was quiet and, on the surface, mostly idyllic. But lurking under the surface was a remarkable yet tension-filled history that fully revealed itself only after he matured and had a family of his own.

He knew the outer perimeters of his parents’ story: the challenges of being Jewish in a place that increasingly alienated them, their individual trajectories as they moved through adulthood, and their chance meeting in a Nazi-created ghetto where they fell in love. But it took a trip to Poland with his mother in 1993 to more fully acquaint him with the depths of their tragedies and the exceptional love story that began in 1943, sustaining them through the war.

Though Sweet Noise features events that began more than eighty years ago, the material is eerily timely.

The material from Sweet Noise: Love in Wartime is excerpted from Max Hirshfeld’s book of the same name, published by Damiani in 2019, and is nearing completion as a traveling exhibition.

Max Hirshfeld is recognized as a master at spotting decisive moments while revealing the warmth and humanity of his subjects. He was born in North Carolina in 1951 and grew up in Decatur, Alabama. After moving to Washington, DC, he studied photography at George Washington University, graduating in 1973. His work has been shown at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Kreeger Museum, and is part of the permanent collection at the National Portrait Gallery. He has won silver and bronze awards from the Prix de la Photographie Paris and been featured in Communication Arts, Graphis, andAmerican Photography.Hirshfeld’s editorial work has been published in The New York Times Magazine, Time, Vanity Fair, and other national publications, and his advertising work has been showcased in campaigns for Amtrak, Canon and IBM, among others. 

This online exhibition was coordinated by Vicente Cayuela for the Griffin Museum of Photography.