Recently, for the newspaper, I reviewed the book “Six Million Paper Clips,” about a project undertaken in the past few years by Whitwell Middle School, probably involving some of the same teens with whom I used to work in Summer Plus.

The students at the school were studying the Holocaust but had a hard time wrapping their minds around the scope of the tragedy. So, they ended up collecting six million paper clips — one for each Jew killed in the Holocaust — as a visual aid. The project has now been documented in a book, written by a German couple who played a pivotal role in assisting the project:

It’s similarly hard to wrap our minds around the scope of this tsunami tragedy. I read another blogger this morning who admitted, with rueful honesty, that in some ways he was more moved by the death of “Law & Order” star Jerry Orbach — simply because the blogger felt as if he knew Orbach, as if Orbach had been a weekly guest in his home.

We need, however, to put a human face on the tsunami tragedy if that is what it takes to prompt us to offer assistance.