BMH gift brings Holocaust statue-walkway remembrance in Hernando a step closer

June 09--Remembrance, education, inspiration, wonder -- and a warning.

The Unknown Child Holocaust grass-roots project to erect a park and place a statue there in Hernando is all these things. And more, especially to the youths learning about the Holocaust and the young people who lived it.

"It's gone a lot further than I ever expected," Alex Santana, a 16-year-old incoming senior at Horn Lake High, said Monday at the Landers Center in Southaven.

There, at a benefit breakfast sponsored by SouthGroup insurance brokerage, he joined hundreds in applauding Baptist Memorial Health Care's gift of $25,000 toward the remembrance park. It was presented by Baptist hospital system president and chief executive Jason Little to Betty Berlin, a Mississippi native and national board member of Hadassah, the women's Zionist organization, to be placed at a sister hospital in Israel.

Alex was in the seventh grade in 2009 when gifted-class teacher Susan Powell planted the seed that grew into partnership with schools and local businesses to raise 1.5 million pennies.

They would be a symbol and memorial to the estimated 1.5 million children lost in Nazi Germany's "Final Solution" of extermination that claimed 6 million Jews in occupied Europe during World War II.

"Before the Pennies Project, I'd never heard of the Holocaust," said Alex. "It really opened my eyes -- and it's opened my heart. It's changed the way I look at things."

Paula Kelman of the village of Czenspoha in Poland was doomed to be one of the lost as a child of 12, "but my sister saved me," the Holocaust survivor recalled.

Jewish children, the infirm and elderly were not wanted for the labor camps. For them, death awaited.

"She cut my hair and she put lipstick on me to make me look older," said Kelman, now of the Whitehaven area in Memphis. "I was just a child and had to lie about my age to survive. We told the Germans I was 16."

Kelman said many of her family members did not survive, including her sister's infant: "They smashed the baby against a wall."

Kelman makes school visits to tell of and educate on the Holocaust, and she hopes the "amazing" future park in Hernando will carry on the mission: "When you grow up in America, you don't appreciate" the faraway horrors of that long-ago time. "It's so nice to see them do that," she says of the memorial boosters.

Said teacher Powell, "We were discussing topics and I found out my students didn't know what the Holocaust was. They were saddened and wanted to know more about World War II, and work on some project."

This became the Pennies Project, aided by Germantown and Collierville home-school students, activist Diane McNeil of Southaven and the establishment of the Unknown Child Foundation. Word spread door to door and through student carnivals, and in a notable event from 2010, Peabody hotel owner Jack Belz let students scoop pennies from the famed fountain.

"I think it's absolutely phenomenal," Hadassah's Berlin said of the park that's nearing reality.

The Vicksburg native, a Memphian since 1973, added:

"It's really great to see this happening in our neck of the woods."

The Pennies Project "means five years of not giving up, and that's what the statue is about -- not giving up."

Hernando-based architect Doug Thornton's park design incorporates a series of six wall sections forming a Star of David and holding 1.5 million pennies.

Symbols on the walkway to the statue -- a life-size image of a child facing the ovens of Auschwitz -- will remind visitors that this tragedy happened, and warn that vigilance and tolerance must keep such events from happening again.

"Rail crossings" will represent the journey to the camps and, for survivors, the path back toward hope, promise and new lives.

Sculptor Rick Wienecke of Israel says the statue, awaiting final casting, has been a challenge "and I'm still trying to understand it all, such a mix of feelings."

The penny, he said, "represents something of value," but as were the young victims of the Nazis, "not enough to bend over and pick up.

"The idea of pennies representing the number of children lost is genius," he said.

For additional information about the Unknown Child or to donate, go online to the foundation's website at unknownchild.com.

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