Slide Show

Tony Vaccaro wanted to become a foreign correspondent, but after being raised in Italy, he returned to the United States less than proficient in English. One of his teachers at Isaac E. Young High School in New Rochelle, N.Y., suggested he become a photographer instead. (He joined a camera club begun by his science teacher, Bertram L. Lewis.) He worked as a caddy to afford a $47.50 American-made Argus C2 camera, intent on taking it with him when he went to war.

“That’s why I became a photographer,” he said. “I had to show this hell to the rest of the world.”

Photo

Those images brought him to the attention of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

On Sunday at the New York Hilton, Mr. Vaccaro was one of about 50 World War II veterans honored along with about 300 Holocaust survivors in New York, the third of four stops on the museum’s nationwide tour to mark its 20th anniversary. Museum officials acknowledged that a reunion of that size is unlikely to recur.

More than 3,000 people registered for the event. Most of the former servicemen, like Mr. Vaccaro, are 90 or older. Most of the European refugees who survived the Holocaust are not much younger.

“It’s fair to say this is one of the last times survivors and World War II veterans will gather in such large numbers,” said Sara J. Bloomfield, the museum’s director. “Their task of testimony will soon be entrusted to the rest of us.”

With the number of living eyewitnesses dwindling, the value of photographs and video testimony has been growing. The museum’s archives include an estimated 90,000 photos.

“They humanize the victims,” Ms. Bloomfield said. “They personalize history.”

Mr. Vaccaro was brought to the museum’s attention by Max Lewkowicz, a documentarian whose mother was a Holocaust survivor and whose fiancée, Elissa Schein, is the museum’s director of public programs.

Mr. Vaccaro, who began as an amateur photographer and later worked for Stars and Stripes, Life and Look, stood with his hand on his heart as a military procession presented the colors, including those of his 83rd Infantry Division, which liberated Langenstein, a sub camp of Buchenwald, on April 11, 1945.

His photographs so impressed an army captain that he was recommended for the Signal Corps, but he was told he was too young. “I’m old enough to do this,” he asked, using his index finger as a trigger, “but not old enough to do this,” pressing his finger down as on a shutter.

He would take as many as 8,000 photographs during the war, developing them in pitch darkness at night in borrowed helmets.

“I smelled like a dark room,” he recalled.

Among his most famous photographs, published in books and other collections, are “Kiss of Liberation,” a G.I.’s homage to a young girl in Brittany, and “White Death,” the snow-covered body of a soldier, whom, Mr. Vaccaro discovered, was his best friend, Henry Tannenbaum of Brooklyn. A half-century later, he would return to the spot with Mr. Tannenbaum’s son, Sam.

No scene was too grim not to photograph. “I took everything,” he said. “I felt the world had to see it.”

Among the other guests Sunday was Hanna Deutch, who is 90 and lives in Jackson Heights, Queens. She attended as a survivor and a veteran: she was evacuated from Germany just before the war as a child and enlisted in the British army as a nurse. Wouldn’t she prefer to forget what happened in the Holocaust rather than relive it during events like these? “The world has to know, to meet people who lived through it,” she replied.

When that is no longer possible, the world will have to depend on videos and photographs like those taken by Mr. Vaccaro, who lives in Long Island City, Queens, and is a divorced father of two grown sons. (He still has a darkroom in the apartment.)

Asked which he shot with first during the war, he replied: “First the rifle. Then the camera.”