"With your great arts helping it, that is certain," said the guard.

And what great art is not urgent or doesn't help its creator survive?

How has art helped to break the silence about the Holocaust?

Some art helps us cope better as life rolls along.

Many of the inmates say that art is helping them to become more human.

"We need the arts to help us have alternative ideas," she added.

But art, she said, can help the Ironbound find its identity.

Yet in the end, that art helped set him free.

City planners, commercial interests and creative figures all agreed that art could help bring life back to the site of so much death.

"I believe art can help society become more spiritual," he says.