Houston helps shape Holocaust remembrance
Social media campaign rekindles world’s attention
Houstonians are taking part in several Holocaust remembrance events, including a burgeoning social media campaign that has rekindled the world’s attention to the horrors of the extermination.
Houstonians are taking part in several Holocaust remembrance events, including a burgeoning social media campaign that has rekindled the world’s attention to the horrors of the extermination.
Called #WeRemember, the campaign has enlisted diverse personages in Houston and has reached 125 million people in 50 countries and 23 languages, according to the organizers.
The Twitter and Facebook campaign commemorates the International Holocaust Remembrance Day coming up this Saturday and is something that sprang up last year during the same memorial observation.
“It soon became a grass-roots and global movement … aimed at reminding the world that unless we remember, these horrors can happen again,” said Robert Singer, the CEO of the World Jewish Congress, the organization that initiated the drive.
The popular social media effort coincides with another ongoing international initiative with strong involvement from Houston.
On Tuesday, the United Nations headquarters in New York City opened the exhibition “The Butterfly Project: Remembering the Children of the Holocaust” that will be on display until February 26.
The exhibit was created by the Holocaust Museum of Houston and includes a portion of the 1.5 million butterflies contained in this institution handcrafted by children from around the world to memorialize the
equal number of minors estimated to have been perished during the Holocaust.
This project is “very relevant today … because it benefits from the lessons of the survivors to educate people about the importance of fighting hatred, prejudice and apathy,” said Kelly J. Zúñiga, the CEO of the Holocaust Museum of Houston.
The exhibit was assisted by survivors with first hand knowledge of the German extermination camps.
‘Left a lifelong mark’
One of them is Chaja Verveer, one of the 996 Holocaust survivors from Houston city registered by the museum since 1996. Today, only 140 are still alive.
Verveer was born in 1941 in Germany occupied Holland into a Jewish family of six.
“My father was executed because he was helping in the Resistance, and we couldn’t hide all together, so everyone went in different ways,” she recalled.
A Danish family took care of her, but in 1944, when she was 3 years old, “I was betrayed and sent to the Westerbork camp,” alone without any family member, Verveer said.
From there, she was packed into a train along with 51 children to the Bergen-Belsen Nazi camp in Germany with cardboard signs hung around their necks saying “Unbekanntes Kind” (unknown child).
Verveer was later sent to a ghetto camp in Terezin, outside of Prague.
“We were supposed to be sent to Auschwitz, but the trains weren’t running there anymore,” she recalled, referring to the most infamous Nazi camp that she escaped only by chance. According to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, about 85 percent of the more than one million Jewish people sent to that concentration camp died, not counting Poles, Roma, Soviet prisoners and other ethnic and nationality groups.
“Those experiences have left a lifelong mark on me,” said Verveer. “That’s why I urge people to stand up for others who are being treated badly because of who they are; I know from my own experience what happens when hate (guides actions) and I don’t want it to happen to others.”
Today’s impact
Part of the importance attributed to actions such as the #WeRemember campaign and the Butterfly project is related to growing concerns in today’s America about the rise of the altright movement and perceived hateful speeches from the top of the administration.
“We would love to say that genocide and hatred are all in the past,” said Patricia Bernstein, author of the book “Ten dollars to Hate: The Texas Man Who Fought the Klan” recently published by the Texas A&M University Press. It is a chilling account of how the Ku Klux Klan became a massive force in the 1920s that infiltrated politics and law enforcement across the United States, and the Texas prosecutor that successfully convicted Klan members.
Bernstein said that studying this chapter in U.S. history shows how hate speech precedes and accompanies hate actions. She explains that it shows a fundamental pattern in which “hatemongers embark on a campaign of harsh, cruel rhetoric designed to marginalize the groups that they are targeting and convince other people that they are either less human or not quite to their standards.”
Unfortunately, she added, “We see hate speech encouraged and supported, and even spoken, at the highest level of our government today.
An increasing national debate points to concerns about the role of President Donald Trump and his administration in enabling hate-motivated actions.
“When the very president of the U.S. is using hate speech, indulging in highly offensive and crude stereotyping and equating hate groups with counterprotesters, extremist groups are emboldened,” Bernstein said.
Trump has been broadly criticized for harsh comments and actions against immigrants, Muslims, African-Americans, women and other people.
Holocaust survivor Verveer has a simple message for people concerned about the present and future generations: “We need to learn to get along; otherwise mankind is not going to survive.”
‘Never again’
The social media campaign includes photos of people holding signs with the hashtag #WeRemember.
“Never again must truly mean never again,” said Police Chief Art Acevedo. He posted photos of himself and staff officers holding posters with the message #WeRemember on Twitter.
“The campaign message of standing up to anti-Semitism, xenophobia and all forms of hatred is something that my department and I strive to combat on a daily basis,” the chief said.