School's Paper Clip Project Attracts Worldwide Attention

By John Gehring

This is a story about two German journalists, one Internet-surfing Holocaust survivor, and the millions of paper clips middle school students in one Tennessee town have received from all over the world.

A small town of 1,600 about 20 miles northwest of Chattanooga, Whitwell is a working-class, mostly white community that has high school football stadiums filled every Friday night and 10 Christian churches just as packed every Sunday morning. The town is not known to have any Jewish residents, and Whitwell seems an unlikely home for a project that has attracted the interest of both Jews and Germans with painful memories of the Holocaust.

As part of a series of lessons on the Holocaust, students and teachers at Whitwell Middle School began a drive two years ago to collect 6 million paper clips in recognition of the Jews who died in camps such as Auschwitz during Adolf Hitler's campaign of genocide. Students came up with the idea after learning that Norwegians wore paper clips on their clothing during World War II as a silent...