Movies - Paper Clips Project

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	Movies - Paper Clips Project

The Paper Clips Project is a project by middle school students from the small southeastern Tennessee city of Whitwell who created a monument for the Holocaust victims in Nazi Germany. It started in 1998 as a simple 8th-grade project and evolved into a project gaining worldwide attention. At last count, over 30 million paper clips had been received. Paper Clips, an award-winning documentary film about the project, was released in 2004 by Miramax Studios.

Development

In 1998, assistant principal, history teacher, and football coach David Smith of Whitwell Middle School suggested to principal Linda M. Hooper that they could use the Holocaust as the basis for teaching tolerance in a voluntary afterschool program. Having difficulty in comprehending the massive scale of the Holocaust, students decided to collect 6,000,000 paper clips to represent the estimated 6,000,000 Jews killed between 1939 and 1945 under the authority of the Nazi government of Adolf Hitler.

At first the project went slowly, as it did not gain much publicity. Students created a website and sent out many letters to friends, family and total strangers. The project started snowballing after it received attention from Peter and Dagmar Schroeder, journalists who were born in Germany during World War II and who cover the White House for German newspapers. They published some articles, and a book "Das Büroklammer-Projekt" (The Paper Clip Project) in September 2000, promoting the project in Germany. The big break in the U.S. came with an article in the Washington Post on April 7, 2001.

After the article, almost every major media outlet seemed to pick up the story. Soon, millions of paper clips started to flood the school.

The city of Whitwell

Almost all observers note the very unexpected location of the project. The small rural town Whitwell has about 1,600 residents, and according to the U.S. census, 97.35% of them are white; it is likely that the residents are not personally connected to the Holocaust or related to survivors. In fact, there was not even a single Jewish person among the population of 425 students when the project began. At the time, the ethnic background of the students included only five African Americans and one Hispanic student.

Whitwell is located in an area where people have been historically regarded as "rednecks." About 40 miles away is the Rhea County Courthouse, where, in 1925, a teacher was convicted for teaching evolution during the "Scopes Monkey Trial". The trial upheld a statute which outlawed teaching any theory that denies the Divine Creation. A hundred miles from Whitwell, in Pulaski, Tennessee, the infamous Ku Klux Klan was reportedly born.

The city is quite poor, as its main business, coal mining, started to decline after an accident 30 years ago; the last mine was shut down completely in 1997. About a half of the students at the Middle School qualify for the free lunch program, which is a benefit for lower income American school children.

At first Principal Hooper was skeptical about the news media attention and the movie, as journalists tended to picture a small, rural and ignorant community. It seemed from their reports to be a "present-day Dogpatch." Just a few seemed to believe that a project about humanity and tolerance could originate in such a town.

The paper clips

Paper clips were chosen in part because some people from Norway wore them on their lapels as a symbol of resistance against Nazi occupation during the World War II. (Norwegian Johan Vaaler is often incorrectly credited for inventing paper clips.)

The paper clips were sent by various people by mail; the letters came from about 20 different countries. Some celebrities, like George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Steven Spielberg, and Tom Hanks, were among those mailing in the clips. As of the summer of 2004, the school had collected about 30 million paper clips. In 2005, many more are still coming in. Most letters contain a personal story or a dedication of the attached paper clips to a certain person. Some of these stories are shared in the movie.

The monument

A monument built from the clips is displayed in the school yard. At first, it was planned to melt the paper clips (symbolizing crematoriums at Auschwitz) and make a sculpture from the metal. However, the Schroeders were convinced to get an actual train car that was used to transport the prisoners to concentration camps during World War II and fill it up with the paper clips. They crisscrossed Europe for many months looking for such a railcar. They finally found one in a railroad museum north of Berlin. The railcar was built in 1917, and after World War II, it had served as a grain car in Poland. At the Port of Baltimore in Maryland, the historic railcar faced some bureaucratic obstacles entering the U.S., but eventually, on October 5 2001 it arrived at its present location in the yard of the middle school.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Paper Clips Project ]

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