Marking the Shoah

CYNTHIA RAMSAY

Opening soon in Vancouver is Paper Clips – a moving documentary about a Holocaust memorial project put together by schoolchildren in a small, Christian community in Tennessee.

In 1998, the principal of Whitwell Middle School decided that something needed to be done about the lack of diversity in her town. Among the 1,600 people living in Whitwell, there were no Jews or Catholics and, in the school, there were only five Blacks and one Hispanic, says Linda Hooper in the film. With the help of assistant principal David Smith and Grade 8 teacher Sandra Roberts, Hooper initiated the Holocaust Project to educate the children about the diversity of the world beyond their insulated valley and about the potentially horrible consequences of intolerance and indifference.

One of the outcomes of this project has been a memorial railcar filled with 11 million paperclips (representing six million Jews and five million gypsies, homosexuals and other victims of the Holocaust) that now rests permanently in the schoolyard. The students began collecting the paper clips – one for every individual killed by the Nazis – in 1999. The collection is a response to the question, What is six million? They opted to use the symbol of a paper clip because, during the Holocaust, Norwegians wore a paper clip on their lapels in a show of solidarity and opposition to the Nazi occupation.

Paper Clips will make viewers teary-eyed in several instances. The remarkable documentary features the students and teachers, as well as Holocaust survivors and those who lost family in the war. The Whitwell memorial is an amazing testament to lives of the people who were murdered by the Nazis. It is also a poignant and necessary reminder of the power of people to make the world a better place.

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