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 mobil killing units that murdered thousands, and the industrialization of death at complexes like Treblinka, Chelmno, and Auschwitz-Birkenau. The exhibit also includes a rare and poignant collection of children's shoes recovered from the Majdanek concentration camp.

The main exhibit also educates visitors about Jewish and non-Jewish resistance efforts, including the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, prisoner revolts, sabotage, the partisan movement, and Lyndon Baines Johnson's "Operation Texas" refugee effort. It includes a look at the Allied liberation of Nazi concentration camps, the Nuremberg Trials, displaced 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 newest addition to the Permanent Exhibit is a 1942 World War II railcar of the type used to carry millions of Jews to their deaths. For more information, on the railcar exhibit, click here.

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