A thousand index cards, in groups of 10, connected by paper clips, were painstakingly draped from the third floor ceiling of PS 246 in Kingsbridge on May 2.

The index cards were part of an effort by Pedro Cruz’s sixth grade class to honor the lives of children who died during the Holocaust. The paper clips and index cards were donated to Cruz’s class by other classes throughout the school.

Each card carried on it the name, age, place and date of death of a child killed during the Holocaust.

For some, the exact date of death was printed: Freddy Groenteman, age 4, died at Auschwitz on July 7, 1942. For others, less is known: Meyer Brill died in 1945 at age 6.   

Jason Monzon, 12, said that during  his class’s unit on the Holocaust, they watched the documentary “Paper clips,” about a middle school in Tennessee that collected 11 million paper clips, one for every person killed during the Holocaust. The film, said Monzon, “inspired us to do this.”

Cruz said that before the class learned about Nazis, they talked about America’s civil rights movement, so students would be able to make a connection between U.S. history and World War II Germany.

It wasn’t until seeing “Paper clips,” Cruz explained, that his students really began to grasp the magnitude of the number 11 million. The revelation, he said, “was pretty emotional for them.”

After seeing the film, Cruz said a student suggested they research the Holocaust’s effect on children, and in doing so, the class discovered that about 1.5 million children had lost their lives.

 “We thought about how many people died,” said Yeiny Redas, 11, “and it made us so sad and angry.”

Groups of students from throughout the school came to see the display, which snaked its way down the entire length of the third floor hallway right into Cruz’s classroom. Dhiloren Tejada, 10, remarked as she stood amongst the many index cards strung together, “It makes me angry that they [the Nazis] did this, just because they felt like it.”

Earlier this year, another sixth grade class at PS 246 spent time learning about the Holocaust as well. Clara Feldman, a survivor, who spoke of her own childhood experiences in Germany and Italy during World War II, visited students in Melissa Murphy’s class.