There are some things that ought never be forgotten, and the Holocaust is at the top of the list. The systematic genocide of six million Jews and seven million others is the blackest of black marks on the history of mankind. To ensure that it does not happen again, one seemingly ordinary community in Whitwell, Tenn., took some extraordinary measures. The Whitwell Middle School embarked on a project to collect one paper clip for each and every Jew who was killed in the Holocaust. The Rensselaer Holocaust Remembrance Committee, as a followup to their usual display of flags on the ’86 field, held showings of Paper Clips, a documentary of the story.
It began in 1998. Principal Linda Hooper wanted the eighth graders of her school to work on a project that would give them a sense of cultural diversity, something otherwise lacking in a community with roughly 1,600 white Protestant children. Assistant Principal David Smith was sent to a conference in Chattanooga, Tenn., roughly 23 miles northwest of the small town, to learn about various possibilities. When he returned, Language Arts teacher Sandra Roberts was enlisted on a project to have the students study the Holocaust. Originally it was just that­—until the students wanted a way to comprehend the six million dead.
They discovered that paper clips, invented in Norway, were worn by the Norwegians to protest the yellow stars forced on the Jews, and the collecting began. At first it went well, with the delivery of 100,000 from a jeweler in California, but only the arrival of Peter and Dagmar Schroeder, German White House correspondents, saved the project from a lull which lasted several months. Within six weeks, after a Washington Post article and a spot on “NBC Nightly News,” the school had 24 million paper clips.
The Schroeders then undertook the titanic task of shipping an actual German railcar, one that had been used to transport Jews, to the school to store the clips. The end result is a magnificent display of 11 million of the clips, representing their count of the total number dead, surrounded by a walkway painted with 18 butterflies, representing the Hebrew word for “life.” The stunning power of all the effort, both physically and emotionally, that all the students and other members of the community put into the project was astounding to behold.
The project lasted five years, and in the end, the school had roughly 30 million paper clips. There were visits from local Holocaust survivors, and tremendous assemblages of community spirit and togetherness. Students were moved to tears by what they learned. Said Hooper, “For our children, I think it was like an icewater bath when the letters began to come.” The children were only beginning to understand that not all the world was like their small, protected community.
The documentary Paper Clips did an excellent and thorough job of walking the audience through the process that Whitwell, Tenn., underwent when it began the project. Not a soul who watched that movie failed to be moved by both the Holocaust itself and the unsurpassably noble efforts of a small, seemingly ordinary middle school in Tennessee.
