LOGAN, Utah - Listen closely to Liat Ben-Shay. To the words she uses. To the ones she doesn't.

They're measured. Weighted. Piercing.

They span nearly six decades of pain, anguish and heartbreak and attach themselves to a piece of cardboard layered on burlap outlined by barbed wire.

You can feel the words. They punch, they scream and they cry.

"I felt that I needed to do something," is Ben-Shay's simple explanation for the dozens of collages and photo displays she put together to memorialize the family members she lost at the hands of Adolph Hitler and the Nazis during World War II.

It's an ode to lost family, but also her effort to educate on one of the most horrific events in modern history - the Holocaust.

"I believe that people need to know about it. Some people are not even sure that it was," said Ben-Shay. "The younger generations, we force them not to forget."

Ben-Shay was born in post-World War II Israel to a father who emigrated to the country when it was still called Palestine, in 1935.

Nehemiah came to the nation from Radom, Poland, four years before Hitler invaded and touched off the war.

"He never told me about his circumstances. It was taboo to talk about it," Ben-Shay said. "My father didn't talk about my family, and I was very curious about it."

She assumed what she was told - that her extended family all perished in Birkenau or Auschwitz or Dachau or Bergen-Belsen, or any number of the concentration camps built by the Third Reich to eradicate all those who didn't fit its "master race."

But in 1995, she got a phone call from a cousin in Poland. He and a few others from the family escaped to a monastery and were raised by nuns through the war. They were so grateful for their assistance they converted to Catholicism.

Two years later, Ben-Shay visited them to learn about her family and tour historic sites and concentration camps throughout Poland. Soon after, she started working.

"Most artists have kind of a catharsis that gave them the drive," she said.

Ben-Shay's work is unique, combining family portraits with Old Testament scripture and visions in her mind to offer vignettes of life in a concentration camp.

"Four Sons in Camp" features figures in stark black-and-white prison garb under the banner "Arbeit Macht Frei."

It's German for "work makes free" and covered in chicken wire.

"One Way Ticket" is framed by barbed wire and mounted on a burlap background - a material worn by Jews while mourning.

The piece also features a bright yellow star in the middle, referencing the "Juden" badge that Nazis required European Jews to wear.

And then there's "The Burned Jewish Bomb" which opens onto a picture of Ben-Shay's grandfather and his brother, who were executed by firing squad during the war.

Ben-Shay has spent three years working on the project called "Family History: A Jewish Family Search for their Roots."

"I hope that people will be sure that the Holocaust happened. There are some that are not sure and in some kind of dilemma," Ben-Shay said. "The other reason is to explain to the younger generation that those tragedies are not once every 100 years. It can happen again, because people are people."

She hopes to bring her work into area schools and is scheduled to have some of her pieces hang in the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., and at Yad Vashem, a Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem.

It's also slated to be on display at the Alliance for the Varied Arts from Jan. 5 to Jan. 27, Ben-Shay said.

"Hitler can be born again. My message is 'Don't forget that we are just people,"' Ben-Shay said.