It was a special day for Creek’s student journalists from both the yearbook and newspaper staffs. The Holocaust Museum Houston impressed students with the horror of the ruthless war and cruel violence of terrifying events.

It is an essential part of journalist’s job to be interested in different events and to find the important information. This trip allowed students to do both in individual ways.

“I think an important part of the Holocaust was reporting the story and getting it out to people, like making them aware what was going on in the world, they had different experts from newspapers from around the world, and especially from Houston, that were reporting on the Holocaust. I think as journalists from a newspaper, that is part of our job to get stories out to people,” Emily Berthiaume, section editor said.

The goal of the museum is to stop violence, to make people think about their decisions, and to treat everybody with respect. The motto reads-“Stop HATE. Starting HERE.”

“The main massage was definitely to stop hate and discrimination, because obviously the Holocaust was the horrible, horrible event, and millions of people died. Even if some of that is not happening on an every day level now, there is still hate. There is still prejudice. There is still prevalence. I think the main message is just to try to eliminate hate now so that kind of genocide never happens again,” Berthiaume said.

The atmosphere of the building illustrates the hard times in the accurate details. Solemnity surrounds you around every corner. Each room feels different.

“I thought the museum was very interesting, because everything in the museum was surrounded around the Holocaust even the architecture and stuff. The outside of the museum was built like a crematorium, and the inside of the museum started off really light, and then it got to darker shades to show that the freedom of the Jews got constricted, and it was really great learning experience. It was really awesome,” yearbook editor Adrianna Henson said.

It is hard to imagine that six million innocent Jews died. In comparison, it is as if the whole population of the greater Houston area disappeared forever. A city this size just gone. Imagine that to truly receive the magnitude of those events.

“I think they that can cause huge things, like the Holocaust, and how you can either do the rights things, and stop that kind of hatred, or just be a bystander and go along with it,” features editor Jenan Taha said.

The museum has the exhibitions about the witnesses of the Holocaust. Pictures show terrible conditions, the humiliation, and the fear of the cruel Ghetto, and the only one thing left, hope. However, there are a lot of different memorials spread both inside and outside of the building itself.

“I really liked the memorial, they had for the children outside. It was basically just like the wall and had a words on it and when you put a rock by it. It is like a memorial for the children that died. I thought it was really moving,” Berthiaume said.

The wall of the tears impresses visitors with the unique appearance. The black wall with the transparent spots, which represent the tears of innocent people, looks different every single day. The museum guide explained that the shadows on the floor made by the sunshine change every day to represent the different humans who were lost on a daily basis in the camps.

The most touching part was the documentary movie “Voices”, which had the memories of the survivors. The video was only 30 minutes long but felt like it made time stand still. During this short period of time it was hard not to cry. Some students left early with tears filling their eyes.

The documentary at the end was really just eye-opening,” Jenan Taha said. She had just watched her teacher leave the room overcome with emotion.

The Holocaust museum truly impressed all of the students and their teachers who were on the trip. They left wiser yet sadder with a desire to make sure that a genocide of this proportion never happens again.

“I think it holds a lot of important history, that, I guess, some people have sort of forgotten about and it should not have been forgotten. I think it’s a really important subject that everybody needs to know about. It is not just about the Holocaust, it is about hatred and how that can spread and that is also really important,” Jenan Taha said.

Due to the feelings this special place evokes, visitors can make the world kinder and better. You cannot visit such a place and not come out of it unmoved.

The Holocaust museum truly impressed all of the students and their teachers who were on the trip. They left wiser yet sadder with a desire to make sure that a genocide of this proportion never happens again.

The Holocaust Museum Houston, the fourth largest Holocaust memorial museum in the United States, was opened in 1996. The museum displays the unbearable suffering of the Jewish people during the Holocaust, danger of death, and inhuman hate, which destroyed millions lives.