[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 147 (2001), Part 9]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages 12600-12601]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]


[[Page 12600]]

               WHITWELL MIDDLE SCHOOL HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL

                                 ______
                                 

                        HON. BENJAMIN A. GILMAN

                              of new york

                    in the house of representatives

                        Thursday, June 28, 2001

  Mr. GILMAN. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to discuss a moving article 
from the Washington Post, which I request to be inserted and printed in 
the Record at the end of my statement.
  The article, entitled ``Changing the World One Clip at a Time,'' by 
Dita Smith, describes a most unusual, uplifting tribute to the 6 
million victims of the Holocaust by a class of Tennessee Eighth-graders 
and their teachers.
  In 1998, the students of Whitwell Middle School, together with two 
dedicated teachers, Mr. David Smith, and Ms. Sandra Roberts, took it 
upon themselves to collect 6 million paper clips and turn them into a 
Memorial Sculpture in commemoration of the victims of the Holocaust. 
What made the ambitious project even more unique was the fact that it 
was conceived in a very homogeneous white, Christian town of just 
1,600.
  In fact, the project didn't even originate as a project, but rather, 
an intimate extra-curricular course to educate the predominantly 
uninformed students about the tragedy of the holocaust.
  This voluntary after-school course had such a profound impact on the 
small-town students, that they decided to take action. The eighth-
graders derived their idea from the Norwegians, who, during World War 
II, pinned paper clips to their lapels to express solidarity with their 
fellow Jewish Citizens
  Inspired by this gesture, the students set up their own web page 
asking for donations of paper clips.
  Their initiative quickly caught fire, and what began as a local 
cause, soon became an international phenomenon.
  The students were overwhelmed by the outpouring of all sorts of paper 
clips from all over the world. They even received a donation from 
President Clinton.
  To date, the students have collected 23 million paper clips, well 
surpassing their 6 million goal.
  For the last leg of the project, the students have determined to find 
the necessary funding for an authentic German holocaust era railroad 
car in which to load and display their paper clips and countless 
letters.
  I have worked closely with Nancy Galler-Malta, the Educational 
Director, and Rabbi Justin Schwarz, the religious advisor of the 
Rockland County Hebrew High School to help them see this project 
through to completion.
  Their task is a daunting one, but judging by the tenacity exhibited 
by the students, thus far, I have no doubt that they will succeed.
  I invite my colleagues to help the Whitwell Middle School realize 
their noble goal, and in the process, spread their vital message of 
tolerance and compassion and to remember this devastating, inhumane 
chapter of world history.

                 Changing the World One Clip at a Time

             (By Dita Smith, Washington Post Staff Writer)

       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.
       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

[[Page 12601]]

     English, was published in September 2000, in time for 
     Germany's largest book fair in Frankfurt.
       The blizzard of clips became an avalanche. Whitwell eight-
     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 scaled with transparent plastic. ``It takes five 
     strong guys to move one of those barrels,'' says Roberts. 
     Against the wali this day are stacks and stacks of boxes. In 
     early February, an Atlanta synagogue had promised 1 million 
     paper ciips, 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 TVs ``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 Germany next 
     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.

     

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