Holocaust History Lesson Includes Stamps

Michele Morgan Bolton, a correspondent for the Boston Globe, writes on the paper's website about a project at Foxborough Regional Charter School that includes collecting stamps to represent victims of the Holocaust and creating mosaics.

She writes, "The Holocaust Stamp Project is now in its third year at the school, where students are trying to collect 11 million stamps, one to represent each victim of the one of the darkest chapters in world history."

According to Charlotte Sheer, who teaches the school’s fifth-grade community service class, the number represents 6 million Jews, including 1.5 million children, and 5 million others in 21 European countries who were annihilated by Hitler’s ruthless regime in Nazi Germany.

The Foxborough students will use some of the stamps they collect to create 18 mosaics. The first, called “With Liberty and Peace for All,’’ already hangs in a school hallway. The mosaics will symbolize the Holocaust’s Jewish victims, 18 being the numerical translation of chai, the Hebrew word for life.

Sheer is quoted in the piece as saying, "Each stamp collected symbolizes one life “thrown away’’ as having no value, much like an envelope bearing a canceled postage stamp is tossed in the trash."

Shown above, one of the stamp mosaics created by the students at the Foxborough Regional Charter School.

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