The Holocaust is such a dauntingly, even overwhelmingly, horrific and thoroughly documented subject that you would imagine people would have begun to turn away by now. And yet the Nazi genocide of the Jews that began nearly 80 years ago continues to inspire books, movies, artworks and memoirs that now span generations.

“What I discover is people are really hungry to learn about this,” says Miriam Klein Kassenoff, who advises Miami-Dade County Public Schools on Holocaust education and runs seminars for teachers on the subject. “How did people allow this to happen? How could six million people be herded to death camps without people knowing? As the years go by it’s really unbelievable.”

There will be a wealth of opportunities to explore such questions in Miami this month, with concerts, lectures, films, teacher workshops, exhibits and plays under the umbrella of Light/The Holocaust and Humanity. The project culminates Nov. 3-4 with Texas’ Ballet Austin performing a dance of the same name, inspired by the story of Holocaust survivor Naomi Warren.

The program is being presented by the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, which saw the ambitious undertaking as an opportunity to connect with a range of arts and community groups around contemporary issues of tolerance and human rights.

“We believe the arts can cause a change in how we think,” says John Richard, the Arsht Center’s president. “This program engages our community in creating a more tolerant society.”

Miami is the third city, after Austin and Pittsburgh, to present Light/The Holocaust and Humanity. The ballet’s creator, Stephen Mills, requires that community and educational events be programmed together with the ballet, with the aim of getting people to think and talk about the Holocaust.

“Meeting Naomi and being able to share survivors’ stories is the most amazing gift,” Mills says. “So I really wanted to share that as much as possible. I’m not egotistical enough to believe everybody loves ballet. But by having a large enough project you increase the chance that people have to rub up against this information.”

Mills came to the subject after the attacks on the Twin Towers sent him into a personal and artistic crisis. “I felt so overwhelmed by what happened, by how someone could be filled with such hatred,” he says. “I would go into the studio to make work and it felt like this really vain, empty process.”

When the education director at Houston’s Holocaust Museum suggested that he examine the Holocaust, Mills thought the idea was “ridiculous.” He was a Gentile from a small town in Kentucky who knew almost nothing about the subject.

“How dare I?” he asked himself. But a meeting with Warren, a determined Polish woman who survived Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, changed his mind.

“She gave me reasons to do the work,” says Mills, who visited concentration camp sites and interviewed other survivors as he prepared the ballet. “Genocide has continued. Hate crimes happen on a continual basis. Children are bullied so drastically that they kill themselves,” says the choreographer, who, as a gay man, has experienced intolerance.

Although Mills confronts the terror of Warren’s odyssey, her hopefulness inspired him to end his ballet on a positive note. Several years ago, accompanied by her American family, she traveled to Auschwitz to confront her past.