Pennies Kids Collected for Holocaust Study Stolen

Each penny represents a life. The children at Marion Manor Elementary School have been on a mission since August to collect 6 million pennies representing the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust between 1933 and 1945.

The money will be donated to support educational efforts at the El Paso Holocaust Museum and Study Center.

But the children’s quest was set back this week when burglars broke into the Lower Valley school.

Sunday night, burglars stole laptop computers and microscopes. They also snatched a few bags of pennies collected by second-graders, said Ysleta Independent School District spokeswoman Patricia Ayala.

The coins were worth only about four or five dollars, but the theft stunned the children trying to do a good deed, said teacher Dolores Montero, who discusses the Holocaust as part of a sixth-grade reading class.

“They (students) asked me, ‘Do they understand what these pennies represent?’ ” Montero said. “They were really upset.”

Montero has taught the course including the Holocaust for four years. She came up with the idea to collect 6 million coins this year as a way for students to visualize the enormousness of the number of lives lost. In all, 11 million people were killed in the Holocaust.

As part of the class, students also listen to speakers and take a field trip to the El Paso Holocaust Museum and Study Center. Only sixth-graders are enrolled in the course, but the rest of the school has joined the penny-collecting campaign.

The pennies are dumped into a 4-foot-tall plexiglass box donated by ProForm Plastics. Maribel Villalva, executive director of the museum, said the museum is grateful for the effort.

“A sixth-grader doesn’t visualize 6 million,” Villalva said. “They can’t visualize 1.5 million, the number of children killed in the Holocaust. We applaud her (Montero’s) efforts.”

An investigation into the burglary continues, but the setback won’t stop the penny collection.

Students “figured we need to focus on the positive and what we need to do,” Montero said. The public can help by donating pennies at the school and at the museum. “Marion Manor can’t collect it on our own,” Montero said.