One Clip at a Time

Photo of Holocaust Museum in Tennessee

In the small town of Whitwell, Tennessee there are approximately 1,600 people, with little diversity. The teachers and principal of the middle school wanted to start a project to heighten awareness about diversity and tolerance. David Smith and Sandra Roberts came up with the idea of studying the Holocaust. The teachers sought to break stereotypes and teach that regardless of who we are, people are people. When the children were learning about the Holocaust a student asked, “what does 6 million look like?” The teachers suggested that they collect something to represent 6 million. The students discovered that the Norwegians used the paperclip during WWII as a symbol of unity and wore one paperclip on their jackets to represent silent protest of defiance against the Nazi occupation. The students wrote letters to other schools, celebrities, and created a website about the project asking people to donate. The project was very slow at first but then Dagmar Schroeder and his wife discovered the project and wrote articles for the newspaper. Through these articles, Dita Smith from the Washington Post learned of the project and consequently did a feature story on NBC and ABC. The paperclip project became very popular after that and people sent letters with paperclips to the school describing who the paperclips represented. The students kept, recorded, and filed all of the letters and they received 24 million paperclips from around the world, 4 times their goal.

The paperclips were taking up a lot of space and the principal wanted to do something about it. She decided to get an authentic Holocaust railcar to hold all the paperclips and make a memorial. While working, they came across a Holocaust survivor poem about butterflies. The pathway leading up to the memorial is decorated with butterflies representing freedom. The memorial was dedicated on November 11,^th 2001.

The students in this small community in Tennessee will never look at a paperclip the same way again. The project helped give the people that perished in the Holocaust a resting place. The paperclip project started with one class of eighth grade students, with one goal; to educate students about the Holocaust. One hand was raised, with one simple question, “what does 6 million look like?” It took one idea of collecting 6 million paperclips to represent every life lost, that rallied worldwide support, transformed a community, and truly made a difference. Changing the world begins with one idea. What is yours? Take it one clip at a time.