Holocaust Museum Houston - Facilities

Facilities

Members of the Holocaust Museum Houston have access to the Boniuk Library. This lending library has more than 5,000 volumes on the Holocaust, the post-Holocaust era, Jewish history, World War II and other similar topics. The library also includes the HMH Archives and the HMH Oral Histories Project. There is a vast number of artifacts, documents, photographs, and film reels in the archives and there are more than 250 recorded testimonies from Holocaust survivors, witnesses, liberators and a member of the Hitler Youth.

There are permanent as well as temporary exhibitions at the Holocaust Museum Houston. An important part of the permanent exhibition, which is called "Bearing Witness: A community remembers," is the testimony of Houston-area survivors. At the beginning of the exhibition the visitor is given an impression of Jewish life and culture in pre-War Europe. Authentic film footage, artifacts, photographs and documents show Nazi propaganda and the move toward the "Final Solution." Another section in this main exhibit is about resistance efforts, such as the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, prisoner revolts, sabotage, the partisan movement, and Lyndon B. Johnson’s "Operation Texas" refugee effort. At the end of this exhibition, the visitor watches two films of testimony. These films give first-hand accounts of survivors, liberators and witnesses who moved to the Houston area after the war.

In addition to the permanent exhibition there is the Education Center, the Morgan Family Center, the Lack Family Memorial Room and the Eric Alexander Garden of Hope. The Education Center houses the museum’s library. The Morgan Family center includes the administrative offices, two other exhibit galleries for changing exhibitions, the HMH classrooms, and the theater. The Lack Family Memorial Room is a quiet place for relaxation and meditation and the Eric Alexander Garden of Hope is dedicated to the one and a half million children who were killed in the Holocaust.

The Holocaust Museum Houston offers several opportunities for volunteers. Volunteers may work as docents or assist in the library, in the administrative offices, at the reception desk and in the bookstore. Multilingual volunteers like Austrian Holocaust Memorial Servants may also work with original source materials and translate informational and marketing materials.

Also present is a World War II-era railcar symbolic of those that had been used to transport German Jews from their normal lives, to the infamous horrors of the concentration camps, as well as an old Dutch fishing boat that carried hiding Jews to safety in its bow.