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] After visiting Holocaust memorials in Germany, Mansour visits the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. There, he meets Irene Weiss, a survivor of Auschwitz, who shows him her photograph in the Museum's Permanent Exhibition, taken immediately after she was separated from her younger sister. After being grouped with other prisoners selected for forced labor, Irene asked them when she would get to reunite with the rest of her family. That's when she heard they had been killed. "We did not believe it," she says. "After a while, if you're there long enough, it begins to be true, but you don't believe it."
