Synopsis
Describes the efforts of middle school students from the rural Tennessee town of Whitwell to create a Holocaust memorial based on a collection of millions of paper clips intended to represent all of the victims exterminated by the Nazis.
Reviews
Grade 4-8 -With clear and concise language, color photographs, and an attractive layout, this book tells the inspiring and touching story of the teachers, students, and community of Whitwell Middle School in Tennessee, and their quest to understand and teach about the Holocaust. The authors, White House correspondents for a group of German newspapers, helped the school publicize the project to collect six million paper clips to show just how many people were murdered and obtained a German railcar to house them. The book includes a lot of quotes and behind-the-scenes information. Footnotes help to define unfamiliar terms. While the book mentions The Diary of Anne Frank, Livia Bitton-Jackson's I Have Lived a Thousand Years: Growing Up in the Holocaust (S & S, 1997), and Hana Volavkova's I Never Saw Another Butterfly: Children's Drawings and Poems from Terezin Concentration Camp 1942-1944 (Schocken, 1993), there is no list for further reading. Regardless, Schroeder and Schroeder-Hildebrand's title will be a helpful and accessible resource for Holocaust educators and students, as well as independent readers. It is also a wonderful companion to the documentary film Paper Clips.-Rachel Kamin, Temple Israel Libraries & Media Center, West Bloomfield, MI
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Gr. 5-8. In rural Whitwell, Tennessee, all 1,600 residents are alike, "white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant." When the community middle school decided to teach diversity by focusing on the Holocaust, the students did not believe that the Nazis had killed six million Jews and five million others. To help them grasp the numbers, they collected 11 million paper clips, which they placed in a memorial made from a German World War II railcar. The paper clip image may seem trivial to some, and the authors don't deal with present-day racism and intolerance, with the exception of one student talking about being inspired to stop bullying. But the story of the memorial project, which reached out across the world, is interwoven with facts about the genocide, and the book's open design, with lots of color photos of contemporary kids and adults involved in building the memorial, will introduce the Holocaust to those who know nothing about it. This may also get students talking. Hazel Rochman
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