Bearing Witness: A Community Remembers

Authentic film footage, artifacts, photographs and documents show life in pre-war Europe, the Nazi move toward the "Final Solution" and life after the Holocaust.

The Permanent Exhibit is personalized with the testimony of Houston-area survivors who lived through a genocidal war that inflicted mass death on unprecedented numbers of innocent civilians. The exhibit begins by carrying visitors back to pre-war Europe and revealing the flourishing Jewish life and culture there. Authentic film footage, artifacts, photographs and documents expose Nazi propaganda and the ever-tightening restrictions on Jews in the steady move toward the "Final Solution." Visitors learn of the horrific conditions within the Nazi-imposed ghettos, the special mobile killing units that murdered thousands and the industrialization of death at complexes like Treblinka, Chelmno and Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The exhibit also educates visitors about Jewish and non-Jewish resistance efforts, including the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, prisoner revolts, sabotage, the partisan movement, persons camps and life after the Holocaust. The exhibition concludes with two 30-minute films of testimony, "Voices" and "Voices II." These films describe the horror of the Holocaust through the moving, first-hand accounts of survivors, liberators and witnesses who made their homes in Houston after the war.

The Museum's Permanent Exhibition also includes an authentic World War II railcar of the type used to carry millions of people to their deaths and a 1942 Danish fishing boat of the type used to save more than 7,000 Danish Jews from execution.