Pull tabs from soda cans were elevated to a humanistic, historical, and educational importance through student efforts. Under the guidance of history teachers Kevin Daugherty and Jane Fisk, eleven million tabs were collected in 1996-97 by public school children from the Mahomet-Seymour Jr. High, Mahomet Illinois to represent the numbers of persons murdered by Nazi Germany during the Holocaust. Six million tabs were collected to represent the numbers of deceased Jews. Additionally 5 million tabs were collected to numerically represent the other murdered minorities, including political dissenters, gypsies, pacifists, disabled persons, homosexuals, as well as others who tried to help the persecuted.

A few months after the collection began, Eva Mozes Kor, survivor of Dr. Joseph Mengele's experiments on twins, visited the students and contributed 119 tabs, each representing a member of her family who was destroyed. Kor dropped the tabs, one at a time, into the 890,000 that the students had already collected. With added conviction the class intensified their efforts, posting their collection on the internet in response to their awareness of Holocaust denier web-sites. Syndicated press coverage fueled national awareness of the tab collection. Millions of tabs began arriving. The students met their goal eventually receiving 11 million tabs from all 50 states and eight countries. At a Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) commemoration, students poured out 6 million tabs in the gymnasium, surrounding the mound with the added 5 million in shopping bags. National and local news media brought this most important school effort into the homes of millions of TV viewers across the nation. At the end of the school year the tabs were sent for recycling.

I learned about this soda tab collection, just after completing a memorial to honor holocaust hero Raoul Wallenberg, commissioned by the Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles. I felt that the tabs, the dynamic experience of the students who had collected them, and the noble efforts of thousands of tab contributors, had taken on the significance of needing to be preserved through an artistic work. Robert Silverman, then Executive Director of the Champaign - Urbana Jewish Federation, asked the recycler to hold up the recycling of the nearly 5 tons of tabs. In response to my interest in using the soda can tabs as the source material for a massive memorial sculpture, Kevin Daugherty, Rob Silverman and the CEO of the recycling plant, Lou Mervis, made available to me these numerical representations of tragically lost lives. After five months of being challenged by the tabs I invented a soda tab feather made from tabs, aluminum wire, and a two foot aluminum rod, that students could build with me in workshops.

Since 1997, approximately 45,000 participants from 23 states and Canada have constructed soda-tab feathers for WINGS of WITNESS. The project creates a network of many thousands of students linked together through art and hope, constantly enlarging.  Workshops with students are continuing until the all of the millions of collected tabs have been formed into the sculpture's components.

After the first million tabs were converted into feather structures in workshops, I created a site specific method of assembling the feather structures into wings. This process also involves students and communities. The feather structures are laid out in overlapping rows by volunteers, according to a placement guide drawn on plastic sheeting, formed as a massive butterfly. The Butterfly shape is a reference to a poem written by young Pavel Friedmann who was a prisoner at the Terezin concentration camp in Czechoslovakia, and perished at Auschwitz.

"Wings Of Witness" at the William Bremen Jewish Heritage Museum, Atlanta, 4/99

Each time the WINGS of WITNESS assemblage sculpture is exhibited, newly made feathers are added, enlarging the single butterfly. The sculpture-in-progress is a touring exhibition traveling to museums and cultural centers across the country. It is accompanied by a sign-in book of pages containing the signatures, collected under their school's name, of the many thousands of participants. WINGS of WITNESS will have been created by more than fifty-thousand participants, when completed.

WINGS of WITNESS was first assembled as a work-in-progress in 1998 at the MSJH school by the students and community that collected the tabs. It was subsequently exhibited September 1998- February 1999 at Yeshiva University Museum, Manhattan. The following presentation was April-May 1999 at the William Breman Jewish Heritage Museum, Atlanta, where nearly one thousand students constructed feathers during the week of Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. Containing over one and a half million tabs, the butterfly spanned nearly forty feet across the gallery. This tragic number represents the number of children murdered during the Holocaust.

In the summer of 2000, the massive butterfly was spread on the side of a mountain slope in Simi Valley, California at The Brandeis Bardin Institute, by the counselors-in-training, campers and institute staff.

From September through November 2000 WINGS spanned the changing exhibitions gallery at Holocaust Museum Houston. In June 2001 WINGS of WITNESS was spread in a meadow at historic Ida Lee Park, Loudoun County Virginia, then in 2003 went on to grace a meadow on Long Island Sound at The Nassau County Holocaust Memorial and Educational Center, Glen Cove, NY. In 2005 the wingspan of the massive butterfly traversed the sculpture garden of the Katonah Museum of Art, Westchester County NY. Similar to other installation sites, WINGS of WITNESS was accompanied by a gallery exhibition with a project photo chronology, and a selection of Schrier’s related works of art. Prior to its exhibition at each of these sites, Schrier conducted workshops where several thousand additional area participants made feather structures that have been added to WINGS of WITNESS.

WINGS of WITNESS workshops continue. Thousands of additional participants have constructed tab feather structures through their institutions and schools in recent years. When needed, added soda can tabs are purchased by WINGS of WITNESS from Ronald McDonald House Charities. The Charities collect the tabs to provide support for familites of severely ill children. Then, the otherwise nearly worthless tabs, have a second phase of purpose in teaching tolerance by becoming part of the WINGS of WITNESS memorial.

In January 2011, At the Wilshire Blvd. Temple, Los Angeles, Holocaust survivor Frances Flaumenbaum (Blady) attended the workshop program providing a powerful note of reality.

Frances Flaumenbaum

Frances Flumenbaum was born in 1923 in Slavkov, Poland (now the Czech Republic). She was the eldest of five children, with two brothers, David and Herschel, and two sisters, Phyllis and Sarah. 

Frances was especially close to her father, Wolf Bar Blady, who owned a grocery store in the nearby town of Sosnowiec. Wolf was a devoted father, helping his children with their homework in the evening and readying them for school in the morning. Frances' mother Bela was a teacher in whose footsteps Frances hoped one day to follow.

The school Frances attended was closed shortly after the German occupation of Poland, but for a time she was granted permission to attend classes n Sosnowiec. On one of her trips in summer 1940 a relative gave her several yards of valuable cloth for the family to trade with their Christian neighbors for food. Frances smuggled the cloth to her parents by wrapping it around her body. Her ruse worked and she made several trips undetected. But on one trip her luck ran out and she was arrested. When her father learned of what had happened, he made Frances promise that she would never betray their benefactor, the father of seven, who would be hanged for his good deed. Her father told her that if she kept silent, she would survive. Frances promised no matter what she would keep the secret.

When questioned and assured that she could return home if she gave up the name, Frances steadfastly asserted that she didn't know. Even when the guards tortured her - burning her arms with cigarettes - Frances kept her promise. She was sentenced to six months slave labor picking fruit in an orchard. Ironically, it was Frances' capture that spared her life. When her sentence ended, she learned that all of her family, except her sister Phyllis, had been deported to Auschwitz.

From Sosnowiec, Frances and Phyllis were sent as forced laborers to Ludwigsdorf, Germany. Frances was assigned to a leather factory where she again dared to break the rules, stealing leather so a camp shoemaker could make shoes for prisoners who had none. Caught, she miraculously escaped serious punishment and for a brief time was even assigned as a maid to the camp's female commandant, cleaning her clothes and shining her boots. That job was followed by one in a munitions factory where the constant exposure to gunpowder seriously damaged Frances' lungs.

Following liberation in 1945, with nowhere else to go, Frances remained in the camp. There she met Sam Flumenbaum, a survivor of Buchenwald, whom she married in December 1946. They stayed in Germany until 1960 when Frances was well enough to immigrate to the United States. With their son William the couple settled first in Springfield, New Jersey and later in Los Angeles. 

Of the Blady family, only Frances and Phyllis survived. Frances thinks often of her sister, brothers, and parents and of the promise a devoted daughter kept to her father.