2008 Woodie Awards
Students experience horrors of Holocaust at Houston museum
By Regis L. Roberts
Issue date: 4/20/07 Section: News
Originally published: 4/19/07 at 6:30 PM CSTLast update: 4/19/07 at 6:30 PM CST
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The purpose of the Holocaust Museum Houston is written on its entrance wall.
Marvin Shapiro, a docent of the museum who gave a tour Saturday to a group of eight from the Methodist Student Center from this college, said the mission of the museum is to continue to educate people about the horrors of the Holocaust.
"Everything you'll see is bearing witness," Shapiro said.
The exhibits and the design of the museum, which opened in March 1996, help visitors do this, he said. It gives them the opportunity to see the hatred of the Nazi regime toward Jews and other groups deemed inferior.
A video of survivors' stories, called "Voices," gives visitors the opportunity to hear what happened in the words of those who lived through the Holocaust during World War II.
Shapiro said many survivors, including one of his cousins, did not want to talk about what they went through.
In the 1960s, many professors from around America and Europe started denying the history of the Holocaust, he said.
This caused many survivors to come forward and testify to what they saw, he said.
"When we cannot talk anymore, let the museum talk for us," one survivor said in the video.
The first thing the students from this college noticed upon arriving was the large cylindrical structure on the outside of the museum.
The brick structure was made to resemble a crematorium, Shapiro said.
Along the outside of the museum is a wire fence that gave the group the eerie feeling they might be electrocuted if they touched it.
The students were impressed by how they were impacted by visiting the museum.
Laura Bass, a graduating criminal justice sophomore, said the museum left her breathless.
Math sophomore Georgina Rice, who has visited the Dachau concentration camp, said the experience of being at an actual camp cannot be duplicated, but the museum did a good job of conveying the feeling. "It's so far physically removed from the scene of the crime," Rice said.
That feeling is mimicked by making the museum's interior look like a prison with bare columns and bolted steel slabs on the walls.
Shapiro said as the museum's exhibits became more gruesome and horrifying, the more confined and the lower the ceiling became.
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