Why We’re Numb to the Toll of COVID
“There were not six million Jews murdered: there was one murder, six million times.”
- Abel Hertzberg, Holocaust survivor [1]
The year was 1998. The tiny town of Whitwell, Tennessee, with less than 2,000 residents, was about to become known for something no one had ever expected.
It all started when Linda Hooper, the principal of the Whitwell Middle School, wanted to give the students of this largely white and Christian town a broader world view. She asked the language arts teacher, Sandra Roberts, and the associate principal, David Smith, to start an after-school program on Holocaust education, a topic that wasn’t yet part of the school’s curriculum.2
So they went about explaining to their students the horrors of the Holocaust, readings books such as Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl (1947) and Elie Wiesel’s Night (1956). Eventually, they touched on the massive number of lives lost during this time. But when the teachers stated that 6 million Jewish people had died in the Holocaust, a young student remarked, “What is 6 million? I have never seen 6 million.”
The teachers realized this was a valid concern. How could they help students understand something on such a large scale? They soon came up with the idea of collecting 6 million objects, in order to visualize the deaths. Through research, the students learned that Norwegians had worn paperclips on their clothing during World War II as a silent protest against Nazi atrocities.
And so began the famous Paperclip Project: a quest to collect 6 million paperclips.
At first, it was just the students, looking for paperclips everywhere they could find. Then they expanded the search. They set up a website, they wrote to people, and they spread the word. Gradually, paperclips started trickling in from around the world. From Holocaust survivors to celebrities such as Bill Clinton and Tom Hanks, everyone started sending in paperclips. Some came with little notes, featuring dedications, names, and stories of family members who had lost their lives to the atrocity. One letter read, “Today, I am sending 71 paperclips to commemorate the 71 Jews who were deported from Bueckeburg.”3
Over the next few years, more than 30 million paperclips were collected. The school then converted this into an exhibition. They acquired a German cattle car that had been used to transport people to concentration camps, and filled it with 11 million clips: 6 million to represent the Jewish lives lost, and 5 million to represent victims from other persecuted groups.
It still exists today as the Children’s Holocaust Memorial.
References
- https://www.ushmm.org/online-calendar/event/mchcrltcol1118
- https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-middle-school-class-created-world-renowned-holocaust-memorial#:~:text=I’ve%20never%20seen%206,quiet%20protest%20during%20the%20war.
- https://www.edweek.org/leadership/schools-paper-clip-project-attracts-worldwide-attention/2001/05
https://alchetron.com/Paper-Clips-Project
Slovic, P. (2010). If I Look at the Mass I Will Never Act: Psychic NumbingPsychic Numbing and GenocideGenocide, 2(2), 37–59. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-8647-1_3 - Slovic, P., & Västfjäll, D. (2018). The More Who Die, the Less We Care Psychic Numbing and Genocide31, 94–114.
- Västfjäll, D., Slovic, P., Mayorga, M., & Peters, E. (2014). Compassion fade: Affect and charity are greatest for a single child in need. PloS one, 9(6), e100115.
- Small, D. A., Loewenstein, G., & Slovic, P. (2013). Sympathy and callousness:The impact of deliberative thought on donations to identifiable and statistical victims. The Feeling of Risk: New Perspectives on Risk Perception, 102, 51–68. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781849776677
- Kogut, T., & Ritov, I. (2005). The “ Identifiable Victim ” effect : an identified group , or just a single individual ? J Behav Decis Mak, 18(August), 157–167. https://doi.org/10.1002/bdm.492
- https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/23/reader-center/coronavirus-new-york-times-front-page.html
- https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/how-communities-across-the-country-are-honoring-covid-victims
About the Author
Preeti Kotamarthi
Preeti Kotamarthi has built and led Behavioral Science teams at two of the largest tech companies in Southeast Asia and India. She established the Behavioral Science practice at Grab, helping product and design teams understand customer behavior to create better user experiences. Currently, she heads Behavioral Science and User Research at Swiggy, where she continues to blend data, design, and human insights—drawing inspiration from spending a lot of time with Indian consumers. With a Masters in Behavioral Science from the London School of Economics and an MBA in Marketing from FMS Delhi, Preeti brings over 12 years of experience in consumer products, from co-founding a rural startup in India to shaping behavioral design in tech. Her passion lies in making behavioral science a core part of the product development process. When she’s not uncovering human insights at work, she’s likely busy applying behavioral lessons on her two-year-old.
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