The Furious Spinner

Have you heard of the Paper Clip Holocaust project? I just watched a documentary about it on HBO. A school in Tennessee decided to do a project about tolerance, and they studied the Holocaust. (I was a bit confused because it sounded like they hadn't studied it before. When I was in school we studied the Holocaust. I can't tell you how many times I saw those horrific movies about the death camps when I was a child. Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it...) Anyway, as they were learning about the Holocaust one of the students said, "How many is six million?" So they decided to figure out a way to demonstrate that. The students discovered that during the war Norwegians wore paper clips as a protest to Hitler. (A Norwegian invented the paper clip.) So the students decided to collect paper clips as part of their Holocaust project. They sent out letters to all kinds of people and they began getting paper clips back. At the same time, they and the community were learning about tolerance—in a community which was nearly all white and all Christian.

They ended up getting a rail car from Germany, one which had transported people to the death camps, and they brought it to their school and made it into a memorial. The car holds 11 million paper clips to represent the Jews, gays, lesbians, and others who were killed by the Nazis.

As I watched the movie, I thought, once again, about the power of one person to change the lives of others. Because the principal of this school decided her students needed to learn about tolerance, the entire community was transformed. This is in a small Appalacian town, mind you.

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