It is just a small town in the middle of nowhere, USA but its impact is now worldwide. And it is all because of a paperclip.
Whitwell, Tennessee is a town of 1600 people just north of the Georgia border.
Half of their population are children who attend the one elementary, middle and high school. Many of the adults who used to work for the mining company now have to travel to Chattanooga for jobs.
And yet, this town has developed a unique and successful Holocaust education project. It moved me tremendously when I was asked to bring my program, Voices of the Generations, to Whitwell.
When students in Whitwell first learned about the Holocaust the number of six million was very difficult for them to grasp, let alone understand. Voices of the Generations teaches about the Holocaust through the story of one woman and one family, my own. In 1998 Whitwell teachers and students came up with a different approach. They decided to collect 6 million paperclips one for each soul. In 2001 the school dedicated a children’s Holocaust Memorial that includes a German rail car which houses a portion of the 30 million paperclips they eventually collected. Today, students guide visitors through the boxcar and the small museum.
When I spoke about my mom’s story to the entire middle school they had been well prepared by teacher Sandra Roberts. Hanna and Walter A love Story, my parents’ book will now be part of the Holocaust Studies Program at Whitwell.
It was an incredibly moving experience for me to be there at Whitwell to speak and learn from them as I hope they learned from Voices of the Generations. They both are important techniques, unique each in its own way for trying to understand the enormity of the Holocaust.
