Today is Yom Hashoah, a day commemorating those who perished in the Holocaust and honoring those who survived. Today’s news sites carried a story about a recent survey commissioned by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany. According to the study, 41 percent of Americans —-and 66 percent of millennials—- did not know what Auschwitz was.
The failure of respondents to
identify Auschwitz as a concentration camp where the Nazis
murdered over a million people, calls to mind a photograph from our book Six Million Paper Clips: The Making of a Children's Holocaust
Memorial. The photo shows a construction paper and paint replica of the
gates at the entryway at Auschwitz.
What is astonishing about this photograph – and this tiny school in
Whitwell, Tennessee which has no Jewish community - is that it
shows how the teachers and students took responsibility for learning
about the Shoah in a bold, visual and personal way. Can you
imagine walking down this school corridor and seeing these visuals? Can you
imagine how it changed the students? The world needs “upstanders,” both Jews and non-Jews, willing
to take personal responsibility to know and to remember.
The book tells the story of how a class aimed at teaching
diversity at Whitwell Middle School snowballed into an
international effort to create a Holocaust memorial.
An excerpt:
At the first class, Sandra [an
eighth-grade language arts teacher] introduced the subject of the Holocaust."Some
70 years ago, the leader of the Nazi Party, Adolf Hitler, became head of the
German government. He hated Jews and blamed them for all the ills of the German
society. He ordered that they be punished. The punishment began with laws that
restricted the rights of Jews. Later the Jews were herded into ghettos,
transported to concentration camps, and forced to work as slave laborers. In
the end, the punishment, over and over again, was death."
The students in the Holocaust class
looked at their teacher in disbelief. "You are joking," one girl
said, "and you shouldn't joke about murder."
Sandra Roberts was concerned how
her pupils would react when she told them that the Nazis planned to wipe out
the Jewish race completely. "They didn't just murder a few Jews here and
there," she told her students. "The Nazis murdered six million Jews.
And between one and two million of these victims were children. Children like
you."
There was an eerie silence in the
classroom. The students looked at their teacher without any emotion.
"Didn't they hear what I told them?" she asked herself. She repeated,
"The Nazis murdered six million Jews."
Finally, one girl raised her hand.
"This sounds awful, really awful, Ms. Roberts, but what on earth is six
million?"
"Yeah, how much is it?"
echoed a classmate. "I can't imagine a number as large as six
million."
"I can't either," Sandra
admitted. "Any suggestions?"
"We could collect six million
of something and pile it up," one boy proposed.
"Good idea," said someone
else. "But what should we collect?"
Everyone had a different idea.
Buttons and pennies were suggested. But none seemed realistic.
"What about collecting paper
clips?" one student asked.
So the Holocaust class of the
Whitwell Middle School began to collect six million paper clips...
Find books for learning and teaching about the Holocaust.