That changed when he confronted a dozen battered suitcases taken from arriving Jews about to be split into those who would work and those who would die immediately. Mr. Kent remembered the SS officers shouting at his family, “Mach schnell! Mach schnell!”

“Hurry up. Hurry up.”

The beatings of the men. The beatings of the women. The biting dogs. The horses trampling the prisoners. This was the last time he saw his mother, he recalled, as the prisoners were divided. For a moment he could not bring himself to talk.

The museum expects to see many visitors like Mr. Kent who live in the New York City area, which, in 2017, had 50,000 Holocaust survivors. Many of them have died since then, and those who remain are in their late 80s or their 90s.

Museum officials say the exhibition’s effort to depict the brutalities of the past is an urgent one at a time of rising anti-Semitism, which was recently underscored by the deadly attacks against Jews in San Diego and Pittsburgh.

Elizabeth Edelstein, the Jewish Heritage Museum’s vice president for education, said the museum regularly talks with survivors about “what aspects of this painful history they feel should be explored, how content reflects their own experiences.” Such conversations prompted the museum to include stories of the “myriad ways ordinary people responded to the unfolding genocide, including inspiring stories of resistance, resilience, courage, and altruism.”

Along with activists like Elie Wiesel and Benjamin Meed, Mr. Kent spent much of his adult life calling public attention to what had been done to the Jews after the relative silence for decades after the war. He has been back to Auschwitz — now a museum — near Krakow, Poland, several times and has seen these artifacts in that pained setting.