'Paper Clips'

Norway invented
the paper clip

Last night we watched a remarkable documentary about a middle school in a small rural white-bread community in Tennessee that began a project to teach its children about tolerance. The Principal of Whitwell Middle School wanted the sheltered children of her community to come to understand the lessons of understanding and compassion for every race and the consequences when bigotry and hatred go unchecked.

And so she sent the Assistant Principal on a mission: to travel to schools in bigger cities and come back with an idea that would do that. He came back inspired by the lessons of the Holocaust and in 1999 the project began. At first the children struggled to conceptualize that anyone could exterminate millions of people, or even what 6 million of anything looked like. And so the children set out to research what they could collect six million of, to help them understand.

Their research led them to learn about the paper clip. The paper clip was invented in Norway and used by Norwegians as a silent protest to their country's occupation during WWII.  The children adopted it as their symbol: one paper clip for each Jew murdered by the Nazis in the concentration camps.

They wrote to communities, movie stars, world leaders, and businesses for donations and  paper clips began to pour in. The children counted and catalogued every one, and stowed them away. Soon packages with stamps from all over the world began to arrive. Some of the paper clips had notes attached with stories and photos and names of actual people who had perished.

Something was clearly going on here. Holocaust survivors in America learned of the project and German news journalists came to meet the children. It was headline news across America. The entire world seemed to become involved in this small town in the Heartland.


Documentary
Movie Logo



 By 2004 and the filming of the documentary, the students had received, counted and catalogued over 24 million paper clips and there was no more room to store them. Over dinner one night, the idea was hatched for a Holocaust Memorial that could also store the paper clips. The German couple spearheaded a search in their own country for what the school leaders wanted to symbolize the Memorial. (You have to see the movie: it's a surprise.)

The couple eventually found what they were looking for and accompanied it to the United States and to its final resting place just outside Whitwell Middle School. At the dedication, Holocaust survivors, the community, children and teachers joined together in a Yiddish prayer.

Today it is the students who teach the lessons of tolerance for visitors who come. And inside are thousands of letters and satchels and photos and stories along with 6 million whose paper clips, one for each Jew, and the 5 million more, gypsies and others who were also killed by Hitler during that time.

http://www.oneclipatatime.org/