Lawrence teacher preserves Holocaust history through art

During field trips to Holocaust museums on Long Island and in Manhattan, Lawrence High School art teacher Janet Lust Ganes asks students to slow down and look closely.

She points out artifacts: the yellow Star of David Jews were forced to wear to set them apart; archival images of Nazi book burnings; a map showing the network of concentration camps across Nazi-occupied Europe during World War II.

“These artifacts make it concrete for them,” said Ganes, 61, of Greenlawn. “I speak about the role of perpetrator, victim, upstander, bystander. The artifacts make an impact.”

For Ganes, teaching the Holocaust through art is deeply personal. Her parents were Jewish Holocaust survivors who fled Europe and later settled on Long Island. Over her 30-year teaching career, she has used World War II history in her art curriculum, encouraging students to interpret survivor stories through visual mediums.

The work displayed last year at the Holocaust Memorial & Tolerance Center of Nassau County, in Glen Cove, featured a collection of Ganes’ art alongside pieces created by her students — drawings, prints, paintings, sculpture, mixed media and poetry. A video of the exhibit, “Lest We Forget: Stories of Hope, Resistance and Survival Retold Through Art,” is also available on the museum’s website. Additionally, Ganes will be part of a new exhibit, “The Second-Generation Photo Exhibit: A Unique and Shared Legacy of Collective Strength and Resilience,” opening Feb. 1 at the museum.

ART BY TEACHER, STUDENTS

“The exhibit is a combination of my personal artwork, mainly about my mother’s story as a Holocaust survivor, and my students’ artwork that has run parallel through my art teaching career,” she said.

Ganes said her students have participated in the Adopt A Survivor program at Temple Judea in Manhasset, created by the late Irving Roth in 1999.

Roth, a survivor of the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps, created the program to build connections, matching survivors with students and artists who make a commitment to share their stories with future generations.

She said she feels an urgency to educate her students on the lessons of the Holocaust following a global rise in antisemitism and Holocaust denial after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attacks in Israel. This coming Tuesday, Jan. 27 is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which commemorates the genocide of 6 million European Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators across German-occupied Europe before and during World War II.

HEARING FROM A SURVIVOR

In December 2024, Ganes organized an event at the Irving Roth Holocaust Resource Center in Manhasset, where a group of Lawrence High School history and art students heard Rosalie Simon, 93, of Floral Park, speak about her escape from death in the gas chambers of Auschwitz when she was 12. Simon was born in Velka Kriva, Czechoslovakia. She described her childhood before the Nazi occupation, the brutality of life in the ghetto and labor camps where her family was incarcerated and the miracle of her survival.

“Afterwards, I did a deep dive with my students into Simon’s story,” Ganes said. “Her delivery was so emotional and the students were affected by it.” In response, three students, senior Genesis Carranza and Class of 2025 alumni Mileena Dagrin and Heather McHale, created independent artworks inspired by Simon’s testimony.

Carranza focused on a moment Simon described in which she said a man had grabbed her in the ghetto and cut off her hair. Carranza created a pen and ink drawing titled “Vermin, Rat, Pig,” and a poem, “Decency,” to explore the terror and dehumanization Simon likely have felt.

“I have a vivid imagination,” Carranza recalled. “While I was listening to Simon’s story, I could see it playing out in my head. I could see a girl, her mouth covered, and someone cutting her hair. Writing the poem, ‘Decency,’ I could only think about how people forget that even during a war people need to be treated decently.”

Dagrin’s graphic art, “Railroad to a Miracle,” made using the Procreate app, depicts the moment Simon was saved by a guard who saw her crying through the window of the locked room where prisoners selected for extermination were sent. The guard gave Simon a prison uniform and told her to join the prisoners selected for work, after another female prisoner volunteered to join her daughter in the group of doomed prisoners slated for extermination in the gas chambers, so that they could die together. “When Rosalie recalled the moment she was pulled out of the locked room by the guard ‘her miracle,’ that moment showed me the rawness of humanity — the connections we hold to each other. By showing her humanity, the guard was able to save a life,” Dagrin said.

McHale’s acrylic painting, “Run,” captures the same moment. “The guard happens to be a redhead, and I am a redhead. Listening to her story made it more real,” she said.

The meeting and subsequent work also had an impact on Simon.

“I was impressed with the work at the exhibit opening,” she said. “ I have spoken to thousands of students, and they have paid attention. It makes me feel like I’m accomplishing something.”

‘WHEN I WAS BRAVE’

Ganes’ mother, Fanny Bienenfeld Lust, told stories of resistance, defiance and escape from the Nazis that made a deep impression. Ganes has explored aspects of her family’s story in drawings, prints, mixed-media collage and sculpture. “Around 40, I realized we almost didn’t make it out — I needed to make some art,” she said.

Her clay sculpture “Nicht fur Juden” portrays Fanny as a young girl in 1938 leaning over a park bench that bears the sign “Not for Jews.” Her reaction is sadness and anger at the Nazis’ segregation and humiliation of Berlin’s Jews.

The medium of solar plate etchings allowed Ganes to incorporate a series of drawings with her mother’s handwritten text to tell Fanny’s stories of resistance as a girl, first in Berlin, then in Nazi-occupied Poland. “My mother’s handwriting had a certain character — she took pride in it,” Ganes said. “For me, creating work using her handwriting felt authentic and means a lot.”

Her piece “The Day I Dared to Be Defiant,” depicts Fanny’s humiliation as a young child in 1933 at seeing antisemitic posters, and hitting a boy who called her a “dirty Jew” when she was 8.

“When I was Brave” explores the moment in 1939 when, after the Bienenfelds fled to Krakow, Poland, two Gestapo officers knocked on their apartment door, confiscated the family’s shortwave radio and ordered them to strip. An emboldened Fanny shouted in German, “How dare you humiliate innocent people this way.”

“My mother turned the shame on them — it was an act of resistance — and they backed off,” she said. “On reflection, it helped them regain a sense of their humanity. This moment defined who my mother was.”

After her father died in 2012 and her mother died in 2021, Ganes created text collage portraits of them in tribute. Working on the portraits helped her work through her grief, she said, enabling her to reflect on loving parents who persevered through adversity.

As a guest artist in Roth’s program in 2005, Ganes painted a gouache triptych, “Driven by Raw Fear, I Ran,” which depicts survivor Ethel Bauer Katz’s story of how she was rescued by farmworkers after being left for dead in the snow near the small town of Bucsacz by Ukrainian militia who she said had murdered her family.

‘GUIDING FORCE’

Throughout her career, Ganes has been a mentor to her students. “Janet has been such an important guiding force in my life,” said former student Jenna Weiss, 39, a National Art Honor Society member who participated in Roth’s program. While other students created artwork reflecting survivors’ accounts of confrontation or cataclysmic events, for her acrylic painting, “Candlelight Reflections,” Weiss in 2003 painted a contemporary portrait of survivor Gisele Warshawsky — who was hidden as a child by the Resistance in Belgium.

“I wanted to paint Gisele in her present tense, in reflection,” Weiss said. “The portrait has a Hebrew word, ‘Zachor,’ which means to remember.

“I feel privileged to have participated in the program. There is no comparison to hearing a survivor’s firsthand account,” added Weiss, associate director of public programs at the Jewish Museum in New York.

Ganes augmented students’ curriculum studies of the Holocaust, recalled Weiss: “As a sophomore I remember her teaching us about German Expressionist painters. That is advanced and comes from her passion about teaching her students about art and history. How you learn about world history — art is an entry point.”

Fanny was a self-taught animal sculptor and encouraged Ganes to pursue art, her daughter said. Having been uprooted from her home, friends and beloved school, it was important for her mother to preserve her story. Her memoir, “Remembering Regina: My Journey to Freedom,” was published in 2015 by Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem. The book’s title credits Fanny’s mother, Regina, a dynamic woman responsible for saving her family. “Writing the memoir was a catharsis for my mother,” Ganes said.

For Ganes, preserving her mother’s story is a part of her larger mission of passing stories on to the next generation.

“Each survivor’s story is unique,” she said. “When students take it all in — the lessons about faith and perseverance, which helped them survive — they see the humanity and the goodness in people who put themselves at risk to save survivors.”