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Spring 2005
Volume II, Issue 2
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| Off the shelf: Peter and Dagmar Schroeder and Six Million Paper Clips |
K-12 MediaShelf editor Ellen Myrick here interviews the authors, and active participants in this story of how a small school in rural Tennessee touched the world through its inspired Children’s Holocaust Memorial.
EM: When you first came across the website for the Whitwell school project, did you have any idea that you would become personally involved? What were your initial reactions to their idea?
P&DS: The reasons for our involvement in the project are very simple: You could call our birth in Germany (1942 and 1943) “accidental.” If we had been born in South Africa, the US or Australia, we would probably be writing about Apartheid, Slavery and Aborigines. As Germans (and Gentiles) who had been toddlers at the end of the Nazi regime we never felt a “collective guilt” but always recognized our “collective responsibility”– as white South Africans, Americans and Australians should feel theirs.
After the “discovery" that our parents and grandparents didn’t belong to the perpetrators (but weren’t "heros" either; two family members—as political opponents—had to spend some time in concentration camps) it was only logical for us to spread the word that evil begins at a very small level and has the tendency to grow if unchecked.
The initial Whitwell project—to collect six million paperclips to visually grasp the enormity of the mass murder—did strike us as rather ingenious, because we too had a hard time visualizing six million. But, early on, we encouraged the students in Whitwell to collect not only six million but 11 million paperclips to represent all the victims of the Nazi killing machine.
Hearing about the Whitwell project we decided that “the Germans" should be informed about it and given the opportunity to participate. This would not only help the project, we reasoned, but would also give an indication about the state of mind in Germany in regard to Nazi politics. We perceived the Whitwell project from the beginning not as a stand against the Holocaust, i.e., persecution of Jews, but as a stand against intolerance in general.
EM: This story is such a powerful example of how the seed of an idea can germinate and spread. Tell me a little about how you decided to step in and help spread their mission internationally.
P&DS: To get the word out in Europe was the easy part: We write, as White House and North America correspondents, for a group of German language newspapers in Germany, Austria and Italy. We published features and columns about the project and asked our readers: “Send paper clips if you think it’s a worthwhile project. Explain why you are participating or tell us if and why you are rejecting the Whitwell project.”
We received thousands of letters and literally more than 100,000 paper clips, and—unexpectedly—only a handful of letters with criticism or from Holocaust deniers. Most letters contained a few paper clips each, explaining who they represented.
We wrote a book with a detailed analysis of the reactions, called Das Büroklammer-Projekt (The paper clip project) and it was published to critical acclaim by Bertelsmann/RandomHouse in Germany. (That led to more letters and paper clips). We donated the proceeds, and some more, to the Whitwell project.
After the book publication we made an old friend of ours aware of the project—Dita Smith, editor of The Washington Post and a native German. She read our book, she traveled to Whitwell and published her article in the Post on Passover Day 2001. On that day we went to Europe to search for an original German cattle car that was used to transport prisoners to concentration camps. The Whitwell School and we had decided that the collected paper clips should be presented in some kind of monument. The cattle car should serve as the focal point of “The Children’s Holocaust Memorial.”
After publication in The Washington Post, the story was picked up by every major news outlet in the US and millions of paper clips poured in. Documentary film makers (The Johnson Group) in MacLean, VA a suburb of Washington, D.C. got interested and started filming.
The documentary titled “Paper Clips" was released in 2004 by Miramax and is now shown nationwide. An editor of Kar-Ben Publishing saw the movie at a pre-screening at the Jewish Filmfestival in Washington, D.C. The publishers got in contact with us, asking if we could do a children’s book about the project. We accepted the offer without hesitation and mainly for one reason: The project demonstrates what children (students) can accomplish; it shows that they are not powerless; and it is in their hands to shape the future.
EM: In hindsight, what strikes you as the most extraordinary part of this whole sequence of events?
P&DS: The question of the “most extraordinary part" is hard to answer. If one stood out it would be this: The innocence of the students of Whitwell who had never met a Jew or foreigners like Germans, and who embraced the project (and us) with open minds, open hearts and without reservation. It was a blank canvas at the school in Whitwell waiting to be painted on. This realization at the same time was a heavy burden for all the “painters" involved (teachers, visiting Holocaust survivors, and contributors to the project). We all were mindful of the power of persuasion. Nazism told us all how easy it is to plant perceived facts and direct mindsets in a more than harmful direction.
And we discovered that people can change. Participating Germans confessed that they had been practicing anti-Semites some 60 years ago and that they would now see the wrong of their beliefs and they wanted to do everything in their power that members of younger generations would not repeat their mistakes. And we met – in Whitwell – some fairly open racists who observed the evolving project and later told us: “This thing got me thinking and I now know that I was messed up". We never thought we could hug a racist but we did. (O.K., it was a reformed racist).
EM: What do you think is the most important lesson students, teachers and communities can take away from the Children's Holocaust Memorial? How do you think the community of Whitwell has been affected by this project?
P&DS: We are a little bit hesitant to comment on “the most important lesson" thing. If we did we would have to say that we witnessed the power of knowledge and information. Nearly nobody in Whitwell knew about the Holocaust. But as they finally did, it got me thinking and a lot of Whitwellians did draw conclusions: Parallels between the mechanics of the Nazi persecution of Jews and their own behavior. And that (in the case of adults) included in more than one case a fairly frightening dose of racism, hate and intolerance.
And the changed Whitwellians confirmed that it is fairly easy to dislike or even hate someone or a group you know nothing about or have tainted knowledge of, than someone you got to know or got to know about. This brings us back to “ knowledge and information."
We can’t quantify the change in Whitwell. It has not become a “city of angels" and there are still bigots in town. But a lot of people have changed their behavior and beliefs. And in our mind: Changing one mind alone would have been worth all the efforts.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that some of the students of Whitwell Middle School had been exposed to racial remarks and beliefs, but we found no sign that these views had been accepted by students. The project handed them the tools to identify different forms of intolerance. Even in their own behavior that was not deliberately intolerant, but in some instances factually intolerant nonetheless. Now the students possess knowledge that hopefully will prevent them from becoming “haters" one day.
EM: What other subjects lend themselves to a similar sort of expression?
P&DS: No easy answer here. We haven’t thought enough about “similar sorts of expression" If we did, we suspect our answer would be book length. Absorbing information (like in the book Six Million Paper Clips), talking about it and drawing conclusions would be key. How to do it is a very complex question; you would have to take into account regional, religious, cultural, historical differences and much more.
And the other problem would be the level of knowledge you would build on. We received letters from German 7th graders and their knowledge of the Holocaust would put a lot of educated Americans to shame. We are coming back to the value of education. Tennessee now has “the Holocaust" in the curriculum for their schools. It didn’t have it before and some states don’t to this day.
EM: Perhaps the most poignant moment from the book is when the student realizes that they are behaving in a way that is not dissimilar, when she and her friends make fun of the outcast student, that moment when she realizes she not only relates to the victims, but the victimizers. Why is that important and how can educators foster that kind of revelation? How would you like to see schools and libraries use this book in the future? What suggestions can you offer for programs to communicate the message of Six Million Paper Clips?
P&DS: Educators (teachers, librarians) can answer better than we. We think that reading about and discussing the Whitwell (Holocaust) project will lead easily to the conclusion that anti-Semitism and the Holocaust is not a unique historical phenomenon but part of a much wider (and prevalent) problem called intolerance (that includes ignorance, bullying and xenophobia). As shown in the book, intolerance can have many forms, it can start with innocent remarks and behavior and can lead ultimately to mass murder.
We would like to see Six Million Paper Clips in every school library. Not to catch dust or for the purpose of demonstrating “openness". But to take out to classes, to be read and as a starting point for discussions. Students would learn a thing or two about the Holocaust. But even more important it will get students thinking about their own behavior and maybe their own biases (or the behavior and biases of people they know). The book can enable the readers to detect signs of intolerance. And maybe one or the other students who didn’t see what has to be seen would change. This would be the biggest reward for us as authors of Six Million Paper Clips.
Readers told us that the book can and should be read by adults too. And even better: By parents and their children together.
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