Area middle schoolers collect shoes for Holocaust project
From left, Canon-McMillan Middle School AP English students Meadow Twaddle, Amber McCool, Brynn Chaplik and Morgan Galligan pack some of the nearly 2,000 pairs of shoes collected by Canon-McMillan and Fort Cherry students.
Students in Tracey Hess’ eighth-grade honors English class pose in the “shoe room” that houses nearly a thousand pairs of shoes for donation. The students are Brianna Allison, Jessica Borovich, Joshua Borovich, Matthew Engen, Elizabeth Galligan, Tom Gilbert, Mike Maga, Abigail McCarty, Cal Miller, Mackenzie Mindek, Katie Nemec, Mark Permigiani, Marie Romanetti, Courtney Sekura, Shane Smith, Riley Sunderlin, Abby Sweetie, Joshua Wilhoit and Sarah Wolfe.
Canon-McMillan students host Alan Morawiec, a teacher whose father survived the Holocaust, from Colorado via Google Hangouts.
From left, Canon-McMillan students Michael Frediani and Himanshu Biradar pose with some of the shoes collected.
A close-up of some of the 906 pairs of shoes donated since mid-May at Fort Cherry School District that will be given to those in need along with Canon-McMillan middle schoolers’ donations.
The son of a Holocaust survivor has inspired middle school students from Canon-McMillan and Fort Cherry to collect and donate nearly 2,000 shoes in honor of the genocide victims.
Project S.O.S., or Symbols of Souls, was partly inspired by the “Victims’ Shoes” display at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. But as classes in both districts started reading the diary of Anne Frank and researched online, they found Alan Morawiec, a middle school teacher in Colorado who had started a school project for donations 16 years ago.
“I wanted to help visualize the sheer number of people killed,” Morawiec said. “My father was taken away from a ghetto in Poland and forced to work on railroads in Ukraine with little food or water. He eventually escaped and joined the Polish Resistance.”
In the S.O.S. project and others, each shoe represents 10,000 lives lost among the millions brutally killed during World War II.
Morawiec joined students in both districts May 24 through a Google Hangout video conference. It was the first time the teacher had done so, and the students said it helped bring the reality of the Holocaust to them beyond Frank’s poignant words.
Teachers Tracey Hess of Fort Cherry and Lauren Paddick and Jen Ford of Canon-McMillan said the students ran the whole project, creating commercials and promotions for broadcast on the districts’ news channels, and scouring social media and local businesses for shoes.
“The kids wrote 150 individual letters to area businesses,” Hess said, “but only got seven replies; yet those donations were generous. Tony Muggar Plumbing didn’t have any shoes to give, for instance, so instead gave $100 to buy several pairs of shoes.”
From May 9 to 20, honors English students in Fort Cherry collected 936 pairs, while Canon-McMillan students brought in 1,010 for a total of 1,946-well past the initial goal of 550. Kids shoes will be donated through Shoes for Nicaragua for children in the country, while adult shoes were donated Monday to the Washington City Mission.
The source material that touched off the project was not lost on the kids, either.
“I just thought it was so amazing how young people (caught in the Holocaust) were able to survive these terrible things and still live their lives,” said Canon-Mac student Angela Preziso.
“It’s crazy how (Frank’s) childhood was taken away by the Nazis, and she still wrote about how people were good at heart,” said peer Katelyn Farrar, “and this shoe project, it’s honoring people like her who died, but also tying it to real life. It’s past to present.”
Fort Cherry student Matthew Engan said the ordeal documented in “Diary of a Young Girl” is relatable for its unusual ordinariness despite the circumstances.
“Most of us can relate to Anne and Pete, and their family fighting. Other students can relate to the situations with hiding and feeling vulnerable, and the frustration of nobody listening to you,” Engan said.