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 permanent exhibit also includes an authentic World War II rail car of the type used to carry millions of people to their deaths and a 1942 Danish fishing boat of the type used to save more than 7,000 Danish Jews from execution. For more information, on the railcar exhibit, click here. For more information on the Danish boat, click here.

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