The Power of a Teacher

Two Thumbs Up for the documentary movie called Paperclips. The story is about a teacher from Tennessee and her project to teach her class about tolerance. The teacher considered her class of 8th graders. The class was uniformly poor and uniformly white. She chose the Holocaust as the topic to promote tolerance. The students asked what 6 million was. They had no concept of the number. To demonstrate 6 million, the school chose to collect paperclips. Paperclips were invented in Norway and worn by Norwegians as a silent yet safe tribute to the Jews being murdered in Germany. Norwegians wore paperclips on their lapels in support of the Jews. The students began to write to people asking for paperclips. They wrote to famous people, family, and friends. Paperclips came in slowly at first but the project snowballed. They ended up with 24 million paperclips from all over the world. The school was full of boxes and barrels of paperclips. They thought it would be good to store the paperclips in a train car like the train cars that hauled Jewish people to the death camps. So they got a train car from Germany that was used to haul Jewish people to Treblinka. They had it installed on the school property. They built a ramp on both sides of the rail car so people could walk through the car and out again. They decided to put 11 million paper clips in the train car. Half the paperclips were for the Jewish people who were murdered and 5 million for the other people who were murdered in Germany - the Jehovah Witnesses, the homosexuals and the disabled. The children carefully chose which paperclips went into the train. Survivors from Nazi death camps came to the small town of Whitwell, Tennessee to speak about their experiences. This project was completed over 4 years time. For some of the students it was a life changing experience. Most of the town helped out by preparing the memorial and listening to the speakers. If you go to Whitwell, Tennessee, you can see the railroad car and paperclips for yourself.