Cries of the Children was Dorfman’s first, but not last, work that dug deep into her roots as a child of Holocaust survivors. With the backdrop of Roman Vishniac’s photographs of pre-war Poland and a hauntingly moving score by David Darling (1979), Cries of the Children, originally a trio, was expanded to a dance for 6 in 1991. Bridging past and present, she explores the pain of “the witness of the witness” and speaks not about the survivors, but about the questions and pain of their children. Dorfman asks: “Who were these people I did not know? Was I like them? How did my parents survive?” And ultimately, “Would I have survived?”
