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Dear LM_NETters:
I just received this and read through it and visited the site. It is
quite a story....I don't see that it is an urban legend so I thought I
would inform the group of what one creative teacher made happen....
WASHINGTON POST ARTICLE
WHITWELL, Tenn. -- It is a most unlikely place to build a Holocaust
memorial, much less one that would get the attention of the president,
that would become the subject of a book, that would become an
international cause. Yet it is here that a group of eighth-graders and
their teachers decided to honor each of the 6 million Jews killed in the
Holocaust by collecting 6 million paper clips and turning them into a
sculpture.
This is remarkable because, for one thing, Whitwell, a town of 1,600
tucked away in a Tennessee valley just west of the
Smokies, has no Jews.
In fact, Whitwell does not offer much opportunity to practice racial
or religious tolerance of any kind. "Our community is white, Christian
and very fundamentalist," says Linda Hooper, principal of the middle
school, which has 425 students,
including six blacks, one Hispanic, zero Asians, zero Catholics, zero
Jews.
"During coal-mining days, we were a mixed community," explains the
town's unofficial historian, Eulene Hewett Harris.
"Now there are only a handful of black families left."
Whitwell is a town of two traffic lights, 10 churches and a collection
of fast-food joints sprinkled along the main drag. It was a thriving
coal town until 1962, when the last mine closed. Some of the cottages
built by the mining companies still stand, their paint now chipped and
their cluttered porches sagging. Trailers have replaced the houses that
collapsed from age and neglect during lean economic times.
Only 40 miles up the road is Dayton, where the red-brick Rhea County
Courthouse made history during the 1925 Scopes trial, the "monkey
trial," in which teacher John T. Scopes was convicted of violating a
Tennessee law that made it unlawful "to teach any theory that denies the
story of Divine Creation" and to teach Darwinian evolutionary theory
instead. Almost eight decades later, most people in this Sequatchie
River valley hold firmly to those beliefs under the watchful eyes of
their church leaders.
"Look, we're not that far away from the Ku Klux Klan," founded only
100 miles west, in Pulaski, Tenn., says Hewett
Harris. "I mean, in the 1950s they were still active here."
Such is the setting for a memorial not only to remember Holocaust
victims but, above all, to sound a warning on what
intolerance can wreak. The Whitwell students and teachers had no idea
how many lives they were about to touch.
Math and History The Holocaust project had its genesis in the summer
of 1998 when Whitwell Middle's 31-year-old deputy principal and football
coach, David Smith, attended a teacher training course in nearby
Chattanooga. A seminar on the Holocaust as a teaching tool for
tolerance intrigued him because the Holocaust had never been part of the
middle school's curriculum and was mentioned only tangentially in the
local high school.
He came back and proposed an after-school course that would be
voluntary.
Principal Hooper, 59, loved the idea. "We just have to give our
children a broader view of the world," she says. "We have to crack the
shell of their white cocoon, to enable them to survive in the world out
there."
She was nervous about how parents would react, and held a
parent-teacher meeting. But when she asked the assembled adults if
they knew anything about the Holocaust, only a few hands went up,
hesitatingly. Hooper, who has lived in Whitwell most of her life and
had taught some of the parents in elementary school, explained the
basics.
Just one parent expressed misgivings: Should young teenagers be shown
terrifying photos of naked, emaciated prisoners? Hooper admitted she
wasn't sure. "Well," the father asked, "would you let your son take the
class?" Yes, she replied, and the father was on board.
There wasn't a question about who would teach it: Sandra Roberts, 30,
the English and social sciences teacher, always a captivating
storyteller. In October 1998, Roberts and Smith held the first
session. Fifteen students and almost as many
parents showed up. Roberts began by reading aloud -- history books,
"The Diary of Anne Frank," Elie Wiesel's "Night" -- mostly because many
of the students did not have the money to buy the books; 52 percent of
Whitwell's students qualify for free lunch.
What gripped the eighth-graders most as the course progressed, was the
sheer number of dead. Six million. The Nazis
killed 6 million Jews. Can anyone really imagine 6 million of
anything? They did calculations: If 6 million adults and children were
to lie head to toe, the line would stretch from Washington to San
Francisco and back.
One day, Roberts was explaining to the class that there were some good
people in 1940s Europe who stood up for the
Jews. After the Nazis invaded Norway, many courageous Norwegians
expressed solidarity with their Jewish fellow citizens by pinning
ordinary paper clips to their lapels.
One girl -- nobody remembers who it was -- said: Let's collect 6
million paper clips and turn them into a sculpture to
remember the victims.
The idea caught on, and the students began bringing in paper clips,
from home, from aunts and uncles and friends. Smith, as the school's
computer expert, set up a Web page asking for donations of clips, one or
two, or however many people wanted to send.
A few weeks later, the first letter arrived. One Lisa Sparks from
Tyler, Tex., sent a handful. Then a letter landed from
Colorado. . . .
By the end of the school year, the group had assembled 100,000 clips.
It occurred to the teachers that collecting 6 million paper clips at
that rate would take a lifetime.
Help From Afar Unexpected help came in late 1999 when two German
journalists living in Washington, D.C., stumbled
across the Whitwell Web site. Peter Schroeder, 59, and Dagmar
Schroeder-Hildebrand, 58, had been doing research at the U.S. Holocaust
Memorial Museum, tracing concentration camp survivors to interview.
Schroeder-Hildebrand was author of "I'm Dying of Hunger," a book about
a camp survivor who devised imaginary dinners to survive; Peter had
written "The Good Fortune of Lena Lieba Gitter," about a Viennese Jew
who escaped the Nazis and devoted her life to civil rights.
The Whitwell Web site came up during a routine search under
"Holocaust." The idea of American children in a conservative Southern
town collecting paper clips intrigued the couple. They called the
school, interviewed teachers and students by telephone, then wrote
several articles for the nine newspapers they work for in Germany and
Austria.
Whitwell and the Schroeders were hit with a blizzard of paper clips
from the two countries. The couple soon had 46,000, filling several
large plastic containers. The thing to do, they decided, was to drive
them to Whitwell, 12 hours away.
They received a hero's welcome. The entire school showed up.
None of the eighth-graders had ever met anyone from outside the United
States, let alone anyone from Germany, the country of the Holocaust
perpetrators. At the end of the four-day visit, the students told their
principal, "They are really quite normal."
The Schroeders were so touched they wrote a paperback about Whitwell.
"The Paper Clip Project," which has not been translated into English,
was published in September 2000, in time for Germany's largest book fair
in Frankfurt.
The blizzard of clips became an avalanche.
Whitwell eighth-graders came to Washington in March last year to visit
the Holocaust Museum. They went home carrying 24,000 more paper clips
collected by the Schroeders. Airport security had trouble understanding
why a bunch of teenagers and their teachers were transporting boxes
and boxes of paper clips to Tennessee.
Linked to the Past Just a year later, the Holocaust project has
permeated the school. The after-school group is the most favored
extracurricular activity -- students must compete in an essay contest
for its 20 to 25 places. They've become used to being interviewed by
local television and national radio. Foreign countries are no longer
mysterious, with hundreds of letters bearing witness to them.
The group's activities have long spilled over from Roberts's
classroom. Across the hall, the students have created a
concentration-camp simulation with paper cutouts of themselves pasted
on the wall. Chicken wire stretches across the wall to represent
electrified fences. Wire mesh is hung with shoes to represent the
millions of shoes the victims left behind when they were marched to
death chambers.
And every year now they reenact the "walk" to give students at least
an inkling of what people must have felt when
jackbooted Nazi guards marched them off to camps. The students are
blindfolded, tied together by the wrists, roughly
ordered onto a truck and driven to the woods. "I was truly scared,"
recalls Monica Hammers, a participant in last year's walk. "It made me
think, and it made me realize that I have to put myself into other
people's shoes."
Meanwhile, the counting goes on. It is daunting. On a late winter
day, as the picturesque valley floor shows the first shimmer of soft
green, 22 students gather for their Wednesday meeting. All wear the
group's polo shirt, emblazoned: "Changing the World, One Clip at a
Time." The neat white shirts conform to the school's dress code:
solid-colored shirts devoid of large logos, solid-colored pants,
knee-length shorts or skirts, worn with a belt. Many of the girls have
attached colored paper clips to their collars.
These are no loose-mannered kids -- they reply "yes, ma'am" and "yes,
sir." Even lunch in the cafeteria is disciplined and relatively quiet.
Yet, there is an obvious and warm bond between students and teachers.
The group's first item of business is opening the mail that has
accumulated during the past three days. That takes half of the two-
to three-hour meeting. A large package has arrived from Germany, two
smaller ones from Austria and more than a dozen letters. Laura
Jefferies is in charge of the ledger and keeps a neat record of each
sender's address, phone number and e-mail address. One group of
students responds to the e-mails sent via their Web site,
www.Marionschools.org.
Roberts opens the packages, which have been examined in the
principal's office to make sure they contain nothing
dangerous. "We've had a few negative letters from Holocaust deniers,
but we have never received a threat," says the
silver-haired Hooper. "But even if we did, we would go on.
We cannot live in fear; that would defeat the entire purpose."
The large package, from a German school, contains about 40 letters,
with paper clips pasted onto each page. Roberts
sighs. "This is a huge amount of work," she says. "There are days
when I wished we could just stop it. But it has gotten way beyond us.
It's no longer about us. There is no way we could stop this now."
When the students fall behind, it's Roberts who spends hours sorting
and filing.
The students crowd around Roberts's desk and receive a letter at a
time. They carefully empty all paper clips onto little
piles. Drew Shadrick, a strapping tackle on the football team, is the
chief counter and stands over a three-foot-high white plastic barrel,
about the size of an oil drum. He counts each clip, drops it into the
barrel, keeping track on a legal pad. Two other barrels, which once
contained Coca-Cola syrup and were donated by the corporation, are
filled to the rim and sealed with transparent plastic. "It takes five
strong guys to move one of those barrels," says Roberts.
Against the wall this day are stacks and stacks of boxes. In early
February, an Atlanta synagogue had promised 1 million paper clips, and
sure enough, a week later a pickup truck delivered 84 boxes bought from
an office supply store. Half are still unopened.
All sorts of clips arrive -- silver- tone, bronze-tone, plastic-
coated in all colors, small ones, large ones, round ones, triangular
clips and artistic ones fashioned from wood.
Then there are the designs made of paper clips, neatly pasted onto
letter paper. If removing the paper clips would destroy the design,
the students count the clips, then replace them in the barrel with an
equal number purchased by the group. The art is left intact.
Occasionally a check for a few dollars arrives. The money goes toward
buying supplies. Both Roberts and Smith won
teacher awards last year, and their $3,000 in prize money also went
toward supplies, and helping students pay for what has become an annual
trip to Washington and the Holocaust Museum.
The students file all letters, all scraps of paper, even the stamps,
in large white ring binders. By now, 5,000 to 8,000 letters fill 14
neat binders.
The letters are from 19 countries and 45 states, and include dozens of
rainbow pictures, and flowers, peace doves and
swastikas crossed out with big red bars -- in the shape of paper
clips. There are poems, personal stories.
"Today," one letter reads, "I am sending 71 paper clips to commemorate
the 71 Jews who were deported from
Bueckeburg."
One man sent five paper clips to commemorate his mother and four
siblings murdered by the Nazis in Lithuania in November 1941.
"For my handicapped brother," says another letter. "I'm so glad he
didn't live then; the Nazis would have killed him."
"For my grandmother," says another. "I'm so grateful she survived the
camp."
"For my son, that he may live in peace," wrote a woman from Germany.
Last year, a letter containing eight paper clips came from President
Clinton.
Another arrived from Vice President Gore, a native of Tennessee,
thanking the students for their "tireless efforts to preserve and
promote human rights," but including no clips.
Every month, Smith writes dozens of celebrities, politicians and
sports teams, requesting paper clips. He gets many refusals, form
letters indicating that the addressee never saw the request. But clips
came in from Tom Bosley (of TV's "Happy Days" fame), Henry Winkler (the
Fonz), Tom Hanks, Elie Wiesel, Madeleine Albright. Among the football
teams that contributed are the Tennessee Titans, the Tampa Bay
Buccaneers, the Indianapolis Colts and the Dallas Cowboys.
So many clips in memory of specific Holocaust victims have come in
that one thing has become clear: Melting them into a statue would be
inconceivable. Each paper clip should represent one victim, the students
believe, and so a new idea has been hatched.
They want to get an authentic German railroad car from the 1940s, one
that may have actually transported victims to camps. The car would be
turned into a museum that would house all the paper clips, as well as
display all the letters.
Dagmar and Peter Schroeder plan to travel to Germanynext week to find
a suitable railroad car and have it transported to Whitwell.
They are determined to find such a car and the necessary funding. Like
counting the clips, the task is daunting.
Whitwell's Legacy Whatever happens, for generations of Whitwell
eighth- graders, a paper clip will never again be just a paper clip, but
instead carry a message of patience, perseverance, empathy and
tolerance.
Roberts, asked what she thought she had accomplished with the project
so far, said: "Nobody put it better than Laurie Lynn [a student in last
year's class]. She said, 'Now, when I see someone, I think before I
speak, I think before I act, and I think before I judge.' "
And Roberts adds: "That's all I could ever hope to achieve as a
teacher."
She gives this week's assignment: "Tomorrow, I want you all to go and
sit next to a person at lunch whom you never talk with, a person that
nobody wants to sit with at lunch. I want you to stop one of those
people in the hall and say: 'Hi! What'd you do last night?' Now, don't
make it obvious -- they may know that it's just an assignment. That
would hurt."
Drew pipes up: "Well, I've already tried that, but that kid -- that,
you know, he just sits there and stares, what can I do?"
"Keep at it -- don't give up," says Roberts.
Class dismissed.
Latest count: 2,108,622 paper clips. 3,891,378 to go.
Paper clips are gratefully accepted by: Whitwell Middle School,
Holocaust Project, 1130 Main St., Whitwell, TN 37397 (c)
2001 The Washington Post Company
Isn't this a wonderful story?!
Click on: <http://www.marionschools.org/holocaust/default.htm>Whitwell
Middle School
--
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Jody Newman
Library Aide, retired
Stow MA
jcnewma@attglobal.net (home)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
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