February 7, 2008-JUNE 4, 2019

Tolerance Kids Liss

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For the entire 32+ years of my teaching career, I have taught my students about Tolerance and how it affects millions of people especially during the Holocaust. After many years, I was blessed with a highly motivated group of 4^th graders who wanted to learn more and do more! Thus began the Tolerance Kids! Through the years, we have held Tolerance Fairs, wrote a play with actual survivors in attendance, created Tolerance Gardens and murals and more. One part of our program is our award winning Bandage Project! In 2008, my Tolerance Kids wanted a way to represent the 1.5 million children who were murdered during the Holocaust. We decided that bandages would honor children; they come in all shapes, sizes and colors and most of all, heal pain. November 2016, we finally had our first .5 million bandages. May 21, 2018 we reached our millionth bandage. We write the names of whoever sends us bandages, or those affected by the Holocaust on every single bandage to honor those children, unless they come with names already on them. Our project honors all the children included in the 6 million Jewish victims, 5 million Polish Christians, Gypsies, Handicapped, Homosexuals and others who were also killed. One day our goal will be reached, our hope is by Anne Frank's 90th birthday! (June 12, 2019) With your help, it did happen on June 4, 2019! In the future, we are hopeful that you will see our bandage project and our book on display at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles or maybe even at a special Children's museum somewhere else. I'm sure somewhere will want this amazing project to be a part of history! Thanks to the Anne Frank house directors, we have decided that one option is to take a million of the bandages after being displayed a year and give them to a refugee camp to use. One student from each year's class will come with us to deliver these bandages! Another option is to continue to display this amazing Bandage Project somewhere local so that all children can see it. Especially important in our deciding to become Tolerance Kids, were Cheronda, Simon and Cameron. The two young men pictured below are now adults, but their friendship ignited our entire Tolerance Project and certainly was a huge reason we decided to go forward with our Bandage Project. Their stories will be in our Bandage Project book along with many more stories that were important and propelled me into doing more to teach about tolerance than ever before.

Cameron and Simon, (2006) one of the inspirations for teaching more about Tolerance, and ultimately the reason we decided to create our Bandage Project.

This is our very first bandage we received through a letter written by Ye Moung in 2008. Selden Smith is a survivor from S. Carolina.

"Kids" from the first whole year of our Bandage Project

Mr. Axel Hannemann, our principal; Natalee, Dreay, Ryan, Anjelica and Isaiah a few of my former 4/5th graders who came to help us paint during Thanksgiving break!

Our first year of our Bandage Project: February 2008-June 2008. Making our first Survivor's mural.

We can't complete our 1.5 million without caring, amazing people who have donated bandages to our project! Thank you to everyone!

"Hate Hurts, Tolerance Heals!" The play I wrote about 5 survivors and their stories of survival. One was Henri Landwirth, who died 4/16/18, Inge Auerbacher, Dientje Adkins, Bozenna Gilbride, and Jay Ipson's stories were also told.