After thirteen years, a Jefferson City, Missouri school has finally collected six million soda can tabs.
“Six million is an atrocious number,” Jefferson City sixth-grade teacher Beth Ayres told the Kansas City Jewish Chronicle.
Ayres was speaking to the newspaper about her school’s thirteen-year long project to collect six million coke tabs to equal the number of Jews murdered in the Holocaust.
“Six million can tabs comes to 32 barrels worth,” reported the KC Jewish Chronicle. “One of the barrels was spilled onto the stage of Lewis and Clark Middle School last week at a commemorative ceremony, to illustrate the staggering number of which it represents but a part.”
“The goal of this project … was to understand the sheer enormity,” Ayres said. “I don’t think, even as an adult, I understood the number. But we have 32 barrels filled, and to think those are (representing) people…”
Ayers said that three former teachers launched the project in 1997: Azelene Evans, Georgia Humphreys and Julia Koch. Evans and Koch coordinated the memorial—inspired by a Tennessee school’s project to collect six million paper clips—with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
“Some survivors find it offensive. They say ‘I am not a paper clip.’ And I get that,” Ayres said. “I also know that in trying to get the students to understand and connect … they did get it.”
But following decade of work, and with the assistance of the local community, Lewis and Clark Middle School met its goal and has decided to donate the tabs to a museum in St. Louis.
“A lot of schools and organizations will start projects like this and invariably they realize they can’t collect six million of anything. They’ll stop at a million and a half, because a million and a half children were murdered during the holocaust,” Don Rich, a curator at the St. Louis Holocaust and Learning Museum said.
But over a decade later, the school succeeded in its goal, providing students with the rare opportunity to visualize six million.
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