Effort to remember Holocaust blossoms in Squirrel Hill

It took 4 1/2 years to collect 6 million pop tabs that form a Squirrel Hill memorial to victims of the Holocaust

By Robert Zullo / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

At first, it was just a simple way to study a staggering statistic.

Searching for a means to give both his students and himself a way to come to grips with the 6 million Jews killed by Germany's Nazi regime and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945, Bill Walter, a middle school social studies teacher at Community Day School in Squirrel Hill, borrowed an idea from a school in Illinois.

Starting in 1996, Mr. Walter's students began collecting pop tabs from cans, one for each of the victims of the Holocaust, the systematic genocide of European Jews. The Nazis also killed hundreds of thousands of others judged inferior, including Roma, Slavs, the disabled and homosexuals.

"The pop tabs each represent a human being discarded and tossed aside without a second thought," Mr. Walter said.

In a month, they had collected nearly 25,000 and Mr. Walter thought the project was moving along well until some quick math revealed it would be two decades before they had enough at that pace.

So the endeavor blossomed into a school-wide project at the private, pre-K-through-eighth-grade Jewish school and soon tabs were pouring in from around the world.

Continue reading.