When Audrey Gelman began searching for wall coverings for her Hudson Valley inn, The Six Bells, she had no idea that it would lead to a deep self-exploration of her family legacy.

Amidst the crop of historical prints that Gelman’s interior designer, Adam Greco, presented, she was particularly taken with the Bavarian folk patterns from the Wallach Project. When Greco told Gelman about the family’s story, “I just became obsessed with it,” she says, adding that she snapped up anything Wallach on eBay.

The Wallach House of Folk Art Munich was founded by two Jewish brothers, Julius and Moritz Wallach, in 1900. The pair were later joined in business by their brother, Max, and grew the business into a bustling European textile and fashion hub, even helping to popularize the dirndl in Germany. But, along with other Jewish-owned businesses in Germany, the Bavarian textile emporium was annexed by the Nazis in 1937 and officially seized on August 1, 1938. Still, the Wallach House remained active in the region. Until 2022, the brothers’ original textiles were produced by Josef Fromholzer—who worked at the company from age 12 through his 90s. (Fromholzer died in 2023.)

Not all of brothers would make it out of the war alive. Max was murdered in Auschwitz, while Moritz fled to New York and Julius wandered Europe and Canada before landing in Pennsylvania. But almost 90 years later, the Wallachs’ descendants, have reclaimed their family legacy and their textiles. Together, a group of the brothers’ great- and great-great-grandchildren from across the United States, Greece, and Brazil founded the Wallach Project, which preserves and reimagines their original printmaking practice.

Gelman is the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors herself, a point of bonding with the Wallach cousins. Her great-grandparents, innkeepers in modern-day Belarus, were massacred by the Nazis along with most of their town. Her grandfather was able to escape and later fought against the Nazis in the Russian Army. Gelman had never publicly engaged with her own family history, but was moved by the Wallach Project’s story. So she contacted Jamie Hall, Max’s great-grandson and the chair of the Wallach project, broaching the possibility of a collaboration. “I just reached out cold,” she says. “I got on a call and I told him a little bit about my own story.”

The cousins behind the Wallach Project were keen to team up with Gelman and The Six Bells to help bring their family’s original prints back into everyday use. On June 24, they will release a collection of contemporary home goods—spanning curtains, throw pillows, dog beds, placemats and napkins, pinafores, makeup pouches—in three of the very same prints produced in the Wallach workshop.

It is a unique opportunity for descendants to make something joyful out of tragedy. Amelia Rosenberg, Moritz’s great-granddaughter and deputy chair of the Wallach Project, notes that preserving the legacy of the Holocaust is a position that the third generation (and beyond) is especially equipped to take on. “I think there’s a generational thing that happens with history and with things like a genocide, where this level of removal allows us to reconnect because we don’t have the immediate pain,” she says.

That pain has kept many of them from knowing their own history—including that of the original Wallach House. “The history felt to me like a tale, like a mythical thing. People didn’t want to talk about it in depth, it wasn’t passed on,” says Cora Sanches, Julius’s great-great-granddaughter and director of the Wallach Project.

Hall, who grew up in the UK and now lives in Greece, concurs. “For me growing up, all I really knew about history was the Holocaust. The story didn’t extend to before that, to this amazing history,” he says. “I saw objects around the place, I saw wood blocks on the wall, I saw these table cloths, but I think it was too painful for my grandparents to really talk about them.”

By reinvigorating the family’s pre-war history, the cousins are also extending their narrative beyond the Holocaust. “It’s my way of honoring my family and the legacy and trying to build this kind of cultural inheritance here in Brazil,” Sanches says.

Descendants of Holocaust survivors seldom have many (if any) tangible objects that tie them to the previous generations—something that isn’t lost on Gelman or the Wallach family. For them, this collection ensures that these offerings, rendered in their family’s prints, are not lost to time. “It’s something you’re actually interacting with,” Rosenberg says. “If you’re looking at something as an artifact, then it remains an artifact. But if you’re interacting with it and utilizing it in your daily life, it becomes something different—it’s part of your story as well.”

For Gelman, it helps to add a new chapter to a story rife with trauma. “There’s a lot of pain and a lot of death and a lot of sadness that surrounds my family’s story,” she says. “It’s so rare to get to do something that is celebratory and sincere and creating something new that isn’t just in a museum. There’s something about this that's very meaningful because it feels generative.”