2018 Fall Bearing Witness Magazine

TEXAS L I BERATORS

EXHI B I TS

Holocaust Survivors Honor Texas Liberators

In correspondence with the changing exhibition, The Texas Liberator: Witness to the Holocaust , which opened on September 7, 2018, Holocaust Museum Houston honored Texas Liberators of World War II and their families at a medal ceremony on Thursday, September 6, 2018 at HMH. Houston area Holocaust survivors presented more than 20 liberators with medals from the Texas Holocaust and Genocide Commission, honoring them as 1945 WWII Texas Veteran Liberators. The medal ceremony was followed by an opening reception for the exhibition. The Texas Liberator: Witness to the Holocaust exhibition tells the story of 25 U.S. soldiers who liberated the concentration camps in Europe at the end of the Second World War. Upon entering the camps, the soldiers were not prepared for the terror, torture and depravity they discovered. Although they were hailed as liberators by the prisoners, what the soldiers found haunted many of them for the rest of their lives. Curated by Texas Tech University in collaboration with the Texas Holocaust and Genocide Commission, the exhibition provided a context for World War II, a history of the Holocaust and the Liberation in an interactive, engaging environment. Visitors toured free-standing panels, each honoring a Texas Liberator featured in the project, including Houston liberators Johnnie Marino, "Chick" Havey, Jesse Reyes, Ben Love and A.I. Schepps.

The Butterfly Project at the United Nations More than 75 years after the young Czech poet Pavel Friedmann famously penned a farewell poem to "the very last" butterfly at the Terezin Concentration Camp, the children of the world have answered Friedmann with the largest migration of butterflies ever seen. The United Nations hosted The Butterfly Project exhibition, made by children from six continents over the last two decades to memorialize the 1.5 million mostly Jewish children who perished in the Holocaust. The display, which was on view January 23 – February 26, 2018 in the United Nations Visitors’ Lobby, represented a portion of the 1.5 million butterflies contained in Holocaust Museum Houston’s The Butterfly Project: Remembering the Children of the Holocaust and was presented as part of the United Nation’s observance of the International Day of Commemoration in memory of the victims of the Holocaust. The Butterfly Project has traveled the world, from the discovery of Pavel Friedmann's poem, "The Butterfly," during liberation of the Terezin camp in 1945 to Houston in 1995, when local teachers and Holocaust Museum Houston staff created a curriculum to teach schoolchildren about the Holocaust and launched it on the internet. From there, The Butterfly Project went viral, and soon the Museum was receiving box loads of butterflies from schools across the globe and even one created on the Space Shuttle. The enormous success of The Butterfly Project tells a survival story of another kind. Because of the unexpected volume of butterflies received, Holocaust Museum Houston had to overcome the risk of damage to the fragile artwork from Houston's heat, humidity and floodwaters. Today the butterflies are stored in 60,000-cubic feet of temperature controlled storage units with plans to encase the remaining butterflies within a vault on the southern campus boundary under construction for reopening in June 2019.

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Clockwise from Top: 1. Dr. Aliza Wong, Dr. Kelly J. Zúñiga, Fran Berg 2. Survivor Edith Mincberg, Melita Abergo 3. Survivor Rosine Chapelle, Bill Kongable 4. Ed Reyes, Survivor Bill Orlin, Lauren Reyes 5. Gerald Powell, Kenneth Christopherson, Bill Kongable, Chick Havey

Clockwise from Top: 1. Nancy Li-Tarim and Soner Tarim 2. Dr. Anna Steinberger, Ruth Steinfeld, Chaja Verveer 3. Evan H. and Nicole Katz 4. Students from Hoboken Elementary School 5. Joy and Benjamin Warren 6. Mark and Judy Mucasey, Sunni and Gary Markowitz

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