Event

Paper Clips

As part of its Searching for an effective way to teach their middle school students about the scale of the Holocaust, a principal and two key staff in Whitwell, Tennessee devise a unique class project involving paperclips designed in Norway by a Jewish man, and worn as a sign of resistance there during WWII.

The school, located in a rural, heavily Christian community, decides to collect 6 million paperclips as a way to realize the magnitude of the mass murder of Jews by Hitler. Instead, they receive 29 million paperclips, as word of their project grows with the help of two German newspaper correspondents stationed in Washington, D.C. whose story about the project is read worldwide.

What happens in the course of the next four years is remarkable and deeply moving, culminating in the students most of whom have never met a Jew -- setting up a campus Holocaust museum in a boxcar used to deport Jews to concentration camps so that they can educate others about the mass slaughter, not only of Jews but of homosexuals, gypsy and other minorities murdered by the Nazis. In all 11 million paperclips are in the museum, one for every person murdered, along with other items of remembrance.

The students meet and bond with Holocaust survivors. Teachers, other adults, and students begin to recognize and acknowledge their own prejudices. A suitcase arrives at the post office filled with Holocaust memorabilia. A train delivers the boxcar, secured by the German journalists and all of this is captured in real time by documentary filmmaker Elliot Berlin.

This project, and the film that tells its story, isnt simply a memorial. It is a living reminder of what can happen when prejudice prevails. Made in 2004, it remains a a fitting way to remind people what happened in the dark days of WWII, and it offers a moving testament to the importance of Holocaust Memorial Day.