By Donald H. Harrison 

It has been eight years since children at Whitwell Middle School in Marion County, Tenn., began the “paper clip” project in an effort to try to understand exactly what the number “6,000,000,” meant.  Their hope to collect that many paper clips from around the world—and to use those paper clips to memorialize the victims of the Holocaust—was more than realized.

School principal Linda Hooper reports that the school stopped counting the number of  paper clips received when the 30 million mark was surpassed.  Yet, even today there still are special moments.  The day that I interviewed her by telephone—Monday, Jan. 30—she had just received in her mail some paper clips that represented another milestone.  Sent from Admundsen, Ice Station Antartica, they meant that the paper clip project would now include responses from all seven continents.

Hooper will be a featured speaker in San Diego on Tuesday, March 7, when she will make presentations at a 10 a.m. luncheon program and a 6 p.m. dinner program for the annual Options event of the United Jewish Federation Women’s Division. The cost to attend either program is $45 for women who already have or pledge a minimum $220 contribution to UJF’s 2006 annual campaign.

The first 11 million paper clips received in response to the pleas from the Middle Schoolers were placed in a railroad car that once had hauled Jews and other doomed prisoners to the death camps.  The car now stands as a monument to all of them in Whitwell, an all-Protestant hamlet of 1,600 in the southwest corner of Tennessee.  Eleven million represents six million Jews and five million people of other faiths and backgrounds slaughtered by the Nazis.

The railroad car was decorated with a design of 18 butterflies, according to Hooper.  The number 18, of course, symbolizes “life,” whereas butterflies for Christians are symbols of renewal.

A second grouping of 11 million paper clips was reserved to memorialize the children who died in Theresienstadt—a concentration camp made particularly famous by the poem, “I Never Saw Another Buttlerfly,” written by 21-year-old Pavel Friedman in 1942, just prior to his deportation to there from the ghetto of Prague.  Two years later he was murdered at Auschwitz.

Hooper said that another 6 million paper clips were shipped to a Baptist school in New York to enable students there—like the students in Whitwell—to understand more about the diversity of the world.

The rest of the paper clips are placed 3,000 at a time with informaiton about the Holocaust into what the school calls “shtetl boxes,” kits that memorialize the murdered Jewish residents of the Jewish village of Lida, Polanda—a shtetl they learned about by combing through material from Yad Vashem.

In the years since the project drew worldwide attention—and was the subject of both a children’s book and a movie—Whitwell students have become accustomed not only to conducting visitors from far reaches of the globe through the memorial but also to traveling internationally themselves.  According to Hooper, the students have given presentations in Germany and in Austria, and in almost every major city in the United States.  One recently participated as a panelist at an AIPAC convention.

The principal said notwithstanding the opportunities the students have had to travel and to reflect upon one of humanity’s most horrific chapters, they remain at heart the unspoiled  children of the rural South. “They love you, they take care of you,” Hooper explained.  “If somebody is bad, they will pray for you; if someone is glad they will pray for you.  It’s a nice Southern town, where people know each other, and they know about you, know if you have a big problem.”

Whitwell is located between Chattanooga and Nashville on Tennessee State Highway 125 in the Sequatchie Valley – which in the local Native American tongue means “hog’s trough” based upon the narrow 125-mile-long valley’s shape.

A contraction from the name given to early settler “Whit" and his "well,” Whitwell was principally a coal mining town until 30 years ago when it suffered a bad accident similar to what recently occurred in West Virginia. 

The town has three schools—the elementary school, middle school and high school—and once may have had the sense of being isolated from other places in the world.  But, reflecting on this, Hooper suggersted that notwithstanding its size and geography, Whitwell was no more isolated than some neighborhoods in urban cities, where people of different ethnicities cling together with littler interaction with other people.

Today, you can take a taped audio tour of the paper clip project and learn something you may not have known about the world.  For example, did you know that Norwegians invented paper clips?  Or that during the occupation of Norway, they wore paper clips on their lapels to protest Nazi inhumanity?

Notwithstanding Whitwell’s celebrity status,  it still is a town in which 67 percent of its children grow up in households that are below the poverty line, Hooper said.  The children, however, realize that they could live under much adverse circumstances;  that they could be living in extreme poverty in the Darfur region of the Sudan, or even worse, live in a country where freedom was denied to them..

So, 30 million paper clips later, plus a book and a movie, what else is there to say?  What  can Hooper be expected to tell the Jewish women of San Diego?

“I love people,” she responds, “I love getting people to think..”  The title of her speech is “The Power of One,” dealing with how one person can affect the entire world. 

”And what have you done to make the world a better place?” she is likely to demand of her audience.