From the AJN:

Paperclips head hopes to inspire Aussies
Peter Kohn

THE principal of the small-town American school which featured in a documentary about raising Holocaust awareness by collecting six million paperclips hopes her visit this month will inspire an Australian school to adopt the project.

In the late 1990s, under the leadership of Linda Hooper, Whitwell Middle School in Tennessee initiated Paperclips as a project to teach the Holocaust.

It was an odd fit for the isolated Smoky Mountains hamlet, with its population of 1600 in the heart of bluegrass music country, where, Hooper says, family roots run deep and, unlike many descendants of the Shoah, “everyone knows their grannies�.

In a town not far from where the Ku Klux Klan was founded, the school’s 425 students had little exposure to ethnic groups and wanted to learn about the enormity of the Holocaust and the fragility of tolerance. The idea came from a school assistant trying to answer a pupil’s question: “What is six million? I’ve never seen that before.�

Students chose the paperclip because they were worn by Norwegians as a symbol of resistance to the Nazis. Thus began the world’s biggest collection of clips. More than 30 million have been collected and are stored in a donated German railcar that was used to transport Jews to camps.

Hooper will relive the Paperclips experience, which was made into a movie of the same name in 2004, when she visits Australia for the United Israel Appeal (UIA) Women’s Division from February 21-March 8. She will address audiences at schools and Jewish community groups in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth.

Hooper said she is keenly aware that she will be speaking to an Australian Jewish community with the world’s largest per capita population of Holocaust survivors outside of Israel.

“I’ve spoken to the Jewish community in Aventura, Florida, which has a huge number of survivors.

“We need to remember that the best acts and the worst acts all started with little things. The paperclip is a tiny thing, we think, but it has got us thinking of issues like love and respect. We need to look at how easy it is for one person to start a groundswell that can lead to something like the Holocaust and to genocides today. Look at Darfur.�

Asked how she viewed Holocaust revisionism and high-profile deniers such as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has called for Israel’s destruction, Hooper told the AJN by phone from Whitwell: “We give too much attention to those people who hate. We should be saying to them, ‘Sorry you don’t know any better.’�

Hooper, a firm believer in accentuating positives, prefers to talk about the massive response to the Paperclips program. President George W Bush, former President Bill Clinton and his secretary-of-state Madeleine Albright, Hollywood director Steven Spielberg, entertainer Bill Cosby and actor Tom Hanks, are among the big names who have donated major parcels. Other parcels have come from churches, synagogues and individual families commemorating loved ones who died in the Holocaust.

“You don’t have to be rich and powerful to make a difference,� Hooper said.

She said there are plans for a reunion of all visitors to Whitwell since Paperclips began, which last year included a contingent of Jewish bikers from Yidden on Wheels, many of whom are descendants of Shoah victims.