Counting to Six Million: Collecting Projects and Holocaust Memorialization

This essay concerns memorial collecting, a new trend in Holocaust education and memorialization whereby groups, often student groups, accumulate six million of a particular object (such as paper clips, buttons, or shoes) to symbolize the murdered. Rather than work through the past, memorial collecting encourages one to play through it, and thereby redirects attention away from finished memorials toward the processes of memorialization themselves. Nevertheless, official institutions of Holocaust memory often refuse to support memorial collections and accuse them of trivializing the Holocaust. Using the example of the Paper Clip Project (the Children's Holocaust Memorial in Whitwell, Tennessee), I examine some of these controversies and what they imply for Holocaust memory.