SAN ANTONIO – Jews in San Antonio and across the world took time Wednesday to observe Yom HaShoah, a day to honor the 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust.
Ed Westermann, a professor at Texas A&M University at San Antonio, teaches classes on the Holocaust. Westermann said he studied the Holocaust in Germany in the Fulbright Program.
"To try to understand perpetrator motivation was what drove me to try to understand the events of the Holocaust," he said.
Westermann has also been a distinguished scholar at the Holocaust Museum in Washington. He also worked with four of the six remaining local survivors.
"We're losing those survivors literally every day," he said.
Wednesday night marks one of the last Yom HaShoah ceremonies in San Antonio, where survivors will share their stories.
"We say, 'never forget. We say, 'never again,'" Westermann said.
He said history must never repeat itself.