The Ambassador of Romania to the United States, H. E. Andrei Muraru, and U.S. Rep. Randy Weber walk away after placing stones, which serve as tokens of respect, at the Eric Alexander Memorial for International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Thursday, Jan. 27, 2022, at Holocaust Museum Houston. This day of remembrance is commemorated across the world in honor of the six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust.
Yi-Chin Lee, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer
Hy Penn gave his tour group a minute to take in the Memorial Room at Holocaust Museum Houston. On one side stood a panel of 600 tiles, each with a teardrop painted on its surface. On the other, the “Cemetery Wall,” where plaques are inscribed with the names of Holocaust survivors who settled in Houston.
Then Penn posed a question to his group of 15, ranging from a 10-year-old boy to people in their 80s.
“Think what you might have done if you were alive then. Would you stand up in protest, or would you sit back and watch? Because this relates very much to the situation going on today,” he said. Penn asked the question again as guests walked through a German train car that likely transported thousands of Jewish people to concentration camps, and once more as the group looked upon a Danish boat used by fishermen to smuggle Jews to safety in Sweden.
“Would you have been an upstander, or a bystander?”
This question appeared to resonate as much today as it would have in the early 1930s when Adolf Hitler began his rise to power. If such an atrocity is to be prevented from ever happening again, the thinking goes, it must first be understood.
The museum hosted multiple survivors and Andrei Muraru, the Romanian ambassador to the United States, Thursday morning for a ceremony honoring those who lost their lives in the Holocaust. During the ceremony, Muraru announced that the Romanian government was instituting a mandate requiring schools to teach all students about the Holocaust. Approximately 220,000 Romanian Jews died during the Holocaust, according to United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
One of the central tenets of the Holocaust Museum Houston is that the genocide did not start with the invasion of Poland or the death of the first Jew.
“The Holocaust started with words, and we’re hearing a lot of words in our country and in the world today and we need to learn how to speak to each other in a civil way, because there’s so much hate speech around and it’s hard to exist and to see a future for all of us,” Penn explained away from the tour group.
Recent debates in the United States about book banning and critical race theory and comparisons between COVID-19 restrictions and the Nuremberg Laws have particularly incensed educators who have worked to teach young people about this terrible era of human history.
“It’s disturbing because it’s part of history and soon, the eyewitnesses are not going to be with us anymore,” said Penn, a longtime docent at the museum whose parents both survived the Holocaust.
“It’s important for people to understand because there’s so many similarities between what happened then and what’s going on today,” Penn said.
That, in part, is why Paul Davis of Katy brought his youngest children, Elizabeth, 15, and Daniel, 10, to the museum on Thursday.
“I think this can instill in my kids a greater desire to be more proactive rather than be a bystander,” Davis, 53, said.
“Ultimately, that’s my greatest hope for my kids is to not be bystanders in life, whether it’s a bully at school or someone being demeaned because of their beliefs,” Davis said.
The message resonated with both children, who agreed the knowledge was valuable, according to Daniel, “so that it doesn’t happen again.”
sam.kelly@chron.com
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