Mansour Omari, a Syrian human rights activist who was imprisoned for nine months and tortured by the Assad regime, smuggled out scraps of cloth recording the names of all 82 of his cellmates. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is exhibiting them to raise awareness of atrocities committed by the regime. This is Mansour’s story. [Paragraph] Mansour recently visited Germany to learn about how that society has memorialized victims of the Holocaust. In chapter 11, he visits the memorial and museum at the site of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. There, Dr. Horst Seferens tells him about the importance of "material witnesses" in combatting Holocaust denial. At the same time, education about what happened in places like Sachsenhausen can help prevent it from happening again. To be back in such a prison, Mansour says, makes him feel "suffocated."
