Over the past few weeks, New Yorkers walking through Times Square may have noticed short videos featuring 12 Holocaust survivors in honor of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which today marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.
The billboard campaign, running at the corner of West 43rd Street and Broadway through March 15, is presented by the Jewish Community Council of Greater Coney Island, a southern Brooklyn organization and community center that has long worked with survivors.
As the number of Holocaust survivors continues to decrease, the project seeks to honor their harrowing experiences during World War II and ensure their stories are preserved for future generations.
Each video, lasting 10 seconds, is displayed four times an hour, with a different survivor featured every week.
Among those featured are 102-year-old Alfred Lock, a Brooklyn resident; Sarah Zuck, born in Poland in 1932; and Trudy Tejerstein, who was nearly 5 years old when the war broke out.
“Those stories deserve to be out there,” said Zehava Birman Wallace, a case management supervisor for Holocaust Survivor Support Services at the Coney Island JCC to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “Their faces deserve to be out there in the world, and a billboard in Times Square is really just a step, you know, a piece of that puzzle.”