The Power Of An Idea (Patricia Potter)

My mom’s in a nursing home. It’s a very good one, and necessary since so many body parts no longer work as they should. The good news is she can read again after a long period of not being able to concentrate well enough to enjoy a book. It had always been her greatest pleasure, a love she and my Dad instilled in my brother and myself. My greatest gift from them ever was enrollment in the Junior Literary Guild when I was six or seven. Christmas came every month with the delivery of a new book. I grew up thinking books were as important as the air I breathed. My brother became a doctor, I a journalist, then author. Both of us remain voracious readers.

She has a great nurse named Kirk at the nursing home (my next heroine is named Kirk), and we have become friends. She went on vacation last week and when she returned she couldn’t wait to tell me about it.
“I went to a school,” she said, a mischievous smile on her face.
“Yes?” I replied, wondering why she would take her precious vacation time to go to a school.
“In rural Tennessee,” she teased.
Curiouser and curiouser.
Okay, my interest is raised. “Why would you go to a rural school on your vacation?”
“Have you ever heard of the Paper Clip Project?” she queried. Having learned that I have great curiosity about everything and everyone, she gave me a satisfied smile as I had to admit I had not.

So she told me a tale that sent shivers down my back.

The eighth grade teacher at the Whitwell School – student body of 450 – was teaching a course on the holocaust. The students at this particular school in an impoverished area of Tennessee were white and Protestant with the only diversity being five African American students. Most had never met a Jew.

And they simply could not comprehend the deaths of six million Jews, and another four million people or more who displeased the Nazi regime.

How to best demonstrate such sheer numbers?

The kids did some research and discovered that the Danes used paper clips as a sign of resistance during World War II, and the the eighth grade students decided to collect six million paper clips to better envision the scope of the Holocaust, one for each Jewish victim of the Holocaust. Word of the project filtered out through the school’s web site, and a letter writing campaign produced a small but steady stream of paper clips. But six million paper clips is a bunch, and they thought they would just get as many as they could. But the number turned into a flood when a 94-year-old Holocaust survivor in New York learned of the project and alerted two German journalists who subsequently filed stories about the project in Europe. Word spread there and in the United States. Letters and emails supporting the effort accompanied the deluge of paper clips. The most meaningful were the envelopes sent by relatives of the Holocaust victims. Their envelopes usually contained one or more paper clips along with the names of those who were lost. A community in Germany donated a cattle car actually used to transport Jews to the death camp in Germany, and the children reverently placed their paperclips there. They added the thousands of letters they very carefully and lovingly protected in volumes open to the public. The entire school and even the community became involved in collecting, recording and saving precious pieces of history. The students answered every letter and every email. Donations came in as well.

The number reached twenty million paper clips, and the Paper Clip Project became a symbol of caring throughout the world. Celebrities sent letters and paper clips and visited the school as well as Holocaust survivors.

The project changed not only a class which learned about tolerance, but embraced the entire school and then community, and brought both closer together. It touched hundreds of thousands of people in Europe and throughout this country. It gave Holocaust victims a voice.

Now people from throughout the country make their way to the cattle car next to a middle school in rural Tennessee. You have to call to tour, then find your way to the small town of Whitwell. Visitors are guided by students to the cattle car where they can spend as much time as they wish reading the letters lovingly preserved in more than eighty volumes: personal letters about friends and loss and terror and survival.

At least one volume includes letters from the disbelievers, the people who say the Holocaust never happened.

A good thing. Expose children to all the facts. Encourage them to think for themselves. They'll reach the right decisions. In this case, they learned a lot about hate and evil but even more about tolerance and love.

As an extra bonus: the thousands of donations are now being used as scholarships for those kids who started the project, kids who otherwise had little or no chance of a college education. And will be used for more scholarships after that.

I marvel at the power and wonder of an idea. And a teacher who wanted to make real to students the people who make up a six-million statistic. I don't know about you, but it warmed my heart. I plan to send a paperclip.

It’s the kind of story authors wish they could create.

I'm always humbled to find the real heroes and heroines today, and that teacher is certainly one of them. It's also nice to be reminded that often reality is so much better than fiction.