Arts & Life

At The Movies

A Lesson In
Tolerance

Students link to Shoah with "Clips."

NAOMI PFEF FERMAN

Special to the Jewish News

W

47101

2/ 3

2005

58

hen George Jacobs heard
about the children's
Holocaust project in
Whitwell, Tenn., he immediately
thought of Malka.
She was the emaciated young woman
who had kissed the mezuzah on his
lapel when the American airman had
visited the infirmary at Mauthausen
after World War II. When Jacobs
returned several hours later, he learned
that she had died; the memory was so
painful that he told no one — not even
his wife — until he read about how
Whitwell middle-schoolers were collect-
ing 6 million paper clips to commemo-
rate the Six Million in 2000.
Jacobs promptly mailed in a clip to
represent Malka: "[It] was so much of
a closure for me," he says in the pow-
erful Miramax documentary Paper
Clips. "Malka has found a final resting
place, not in Austria, Germany or
Poland but in Appalachia, Tenn. I
can't get over that."
The film opens tomorrow in an exclu-
sive engagement at the Uptown
Birmingham 8, in Birmingham. It was
screened last year as part of the Jewish
Community Center's Lenore Marwil
Jewish Film Festival, where it won the
festival's Harold and Sarah Gottlieb Prize
for Contributions to Jewish Culture.
Indeed, Whitwell (population 1,600)
— with just two traffic lights, two gas
stations, 10 churches and no Jews —
seems an unusual place for a Holocaust
memorial, especially one that has
become an international cause celebre.
While the low-income former mining
community isn't the first rural, Christian
town to teach tolerance through the
Shoah, and to earn headlines in the
process, it is probably the best known.
Whkwell's project began because "our
children didn't have much opportunity
to learn about other people," middle
school principal Linda Hooper said. So
in 1998 she sent Assistant Principal
David Smith to a teacher training con-
ference to "find something that would
help students learn about other cul-
tures."
He found it in a Holocaust education-
al seminar: "We had never discussed the
subject in our high school, and to be

honest I don't think I'd ever met a Jew,"
Smith said in an interview. "When the
survivor was done speaking, I was in
tears, and I thought, This is it. This is
how we're going to teach tolerance to
our children.'"
That October, Smith and a co-teacher
began reading aloud to students from
books such as Eli Wiesel's Night. When
the concept of 6 million proved incom-
prehensible to the middle-schoolers, the
teenagers resolved to launch a collection
to better understand the magnitude of
the Shoah.
They decided on paper clips after
learning that Norwegians had worn
them to show solidarity with Jews dur-
ing the war.
After German journalists wrote articles
and a book on the project, letters and
clips from 19 countries inundated the
school, including submissions from Tom
Hanks and President Clinton. "We
counted paper clips night and day that
summer," Hooper said.

oft
Whitwell Middle School in Whitwelh Tenn., collected more then 30 million paper dips.

birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan and to
the courthouse where John T Scopes
was convicted of teaching evolution in
the 1925 "monkey trial."
"It was the image that people often get
of the South: that we're all stupid, preju-
diced rednecks," Hooper said.
Thus she ignored the Virginia-based
filmmakers who called her twice a day
for weeks about making Paper Clips in
2001. Hooper refused to speak with
them, in fact, until she had "phoned
everyone for whom they'd ever made a
documentary," she said.
When co-directors Joe Fab and Elliot
Berlin finally sat down with her that
spring, "she ushered us in, then kept us

awaited the cattle car that had been
purchased for $6,000 from a German
railroad museum. It arrived, via ship
and rail, in time for the memorial's
dedication on Nov. 9, 2001, attended
by the entire town.
"It was amazing seeing children sing
`We Shall Never Forget,' who had
never previously heard of the
Holocaust," Fab said.
Equally moving was the final inter-
view with Smith: "When the project
began, I was very prejudiced in many
areas," the assistant principal says in
the film. "[The memorial] has made
me a better ... father, a better teacher, a
better man."
Jacobs is grateful for the endeavor.
"It's giving [Malka] a resting place
among young people who love her and
have compassion for her, and you
couldn't ask for a better resting place
than that," he said. O

Paper Clips, rated G, opens Friday,
Feb. 4, at the Uptown Birmingham
8, in Birmingham. Check your
local movie listings.

Paper Gips will be shown in an
exclusive screening for 25-40-year-
olds, brought to the community by
Unfettered, a program in partner-
The school houses clips and documents in a bona fide cattle car that had transported .ship with the Jewish Federation
and sponsored by the Frances and
Jews to German concentration camps.
Joseph Fetter Millennium Fund, at
7:30 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 5, at the
Meanwhile, students scrapped their
Uptown
Birmingham 8, 211 South
waiting," Berlin recalled.
initial idea to melt the collection into a
Old
Woodward,
in Birmingham.
When the tall, silver-haired principal
sculpture: "These paper clips represented finally looked up from her work, she
Following the screening, audi-
people who had been through the fire,
ence members will have the oppor-
said, "If I let you make this film, and
and we did not want that to happen
tunity to meet two students fea-
you make my children look like ignorant
again," Hooper said. Their new goal: to
tured in Paper Clips, their teacher
hillbillies, I will eat your heart for break-
house the clips and documents in a
and the film editor. Tickets are $25
fast," Fab said. "Somehow, we got her
bona-fide cattle car that had transported
per
person and include the movie,
to understand that we wanted to make
Jews to concentration camps.
program
and refreshments. Tickets
the movie because we already respected
As international media descended on
are available by reservation only.
her children."
Whitwell, Hooper felt her community
Contact Julie Zuckerman, 248-
Over the next 18 months, the direc-
was undergoing trial by fire. Newspapers tors captured the students as they sort-
: 203-1497, or register online:
cited the town's proximity to the
www.thisisfed.eration.orgfunfettered
ed more than 30 million clips and