NARRATOR Holocaust Museum Houston’s building has numerous unique design features. In one section, a slope or ramp begins at the ground then rises up to form part of the roof, the top detailed with individual paving stones. Architect Mark Mucasey: MARK Those paving stones we call The Tiles of the Destroyed Communities. And what we're trying to represent is what the Nazis did during the war. They would enter a town, a Jewish town, and they would take literally the gravestones of those in the cemeteries and they would use those as pave stones for roads. We have created our symbolic or representative of that road that literally rises up out of the ground. Each one of those tiles is dedicated to a community that was destroyed, the Jewish portion of that community that was destroyed during the war. NARRATOR Dr. Kelly Zúñiga explains the origin of the tiles: KELLY It was survivors again, within Houston that decided this would be an incredible way to memorialize those, communities that were lost. NARRATOR Mark Mucasey offers additional perspective on the impact of the architecture on the museum’s visitors: MARK I think what we've allowed them to do is to stand right next to those Destroyed Community tiles. And they can read the names of the various ones in the foreground. But then as they look up that slope, they can see that there are additional tiles, to an extent that it's almost hard to grasp, how many cities were destroyed by the Nazis. NARRATOR The Nazis destroyed not only cities, but the communities within them, and also villages and shtetls. NARRATOR Dr. Kelly Zúñiga talks about additional resources found at the museum to learn more about these destroyed communities. KELLY We have a lot of people that travel here internationally, and they come to the museum and they take a lot of time to see if their community is recognized on our slope. And don't forget we have an electronic database that's tied to the slope within the core exhibition, which is really wonderful because it has the photographs and history associated with the survivors that had a connection to that particular city. NARRATOR It’s important to remember that it was the Jewish communities, not necessarily the structures, which were destroyed by the Nazis. In many cases, the buildings and towns still exist. Mark Mucasey shares the impact when the architecture of a place remains but the people are gone. MARK It's very simple. It reminds me of exactly what took place at the hands of the Nazis. They would go into, homes and businesses and remove the Jews, and put the Germans into it. Or put the locals back into it. We were extracted and then we were annihilated.