Students at Whitwell Middle School will be awarded the George Washington Award from Freedoms Foundation of Valley Forge at ceremonies Sunday, Feb. 16, at 2 p.m.
The event will be at Oakwood Baptist Church.
Special speaker will be Eric Greenwood, secretary of the Freedoms Foundation board. Mr. Greenwood is also a vice president of the Goldman, Sachs investment firm at Philadelphia.
The Whitwell Middle School class is being honored in connection with a special project on the Holocaust topic.
Students began collecting paper clips in memory of each of the 6 million Holocaust victims.
A couple from Germany donated a train car that was used to carry victims to death camps.
The car has been set up at a memorial park in Whitwell, and it includes the accumulated paper clips, along with many letters received from families of Holocaust victims.
Linda M. Hooper, principal, gave this information about "The Children's Holocaust Memorial"
How did the project begin? In 1998 principal Linda M. Hooper wanted to begin a project that would teach the students of Whitwell Middle School (Whitwell, Tennessee) about the importance of tolerating and respecting different cultures. Mrs. Hooper sent David Smith, 8th grade history teacher, football coach and assistant principal to a teacher-training course in Chattanooga. He returned and proposed that the school offer a course about the Holocaust. Mr. Smith and 8th grade language arts teacher Sandra Roberts held the first session of the project in October of 1998. What gripped the eighth graders most as the course progressed was the sheer number of Jews exterminated by the Nazis. Six million was a figure that they could not imagine. The students also could not understand why no one seemed to protest the exterminations. In 1999 the students decided that they wanted to collect something that would tangibly illustrate the enormity of this horrible event.
Why collect paper clips? Paper clips were chosen because the students discovered through their Internet research that many Norwegians wore a paper clip on their lapels during the war as a show of support for the Jews and also that the paper clip was a Norwegian invention. They convinced the principal that because paper clips were so small storing them at school should not be a problem. The idea caught on and the students began bringing in paper clips, from home, from family and from friends. The group set up a Web Page. They registered their project with the National Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. Letters were sent out to elected officials, celebrities, and the news media requesting paper clips. A few weeks later the first letter arrived. Others quickly followed. Many contained not only paper clips but also written accounts from Jewish families about their suffering. All sorts of clips have arrived for the project, silver and bronze colored clips, colorful plastic coated clips, small clips, large clips, round clips, triangular clips and clips fashioned from wood. The students in Whitwell have collected thirty million+ paper clips and over thirty thousand letters from all fifty states, fifty foreign countries, and six of the seven continents. For generations of Whitwell students, a paper clip will never again be just a paper clip. Instead, paper clips will be a reminder of suffering, perseverance, empathy, tolerance, understanding, and overcoming. The students and members of the community have counted every paper clip and filed all the letters received in ring binders. Presently a member of the community is in the process of sorting the letters into categories to scan them on to computer disks so that the information they contain can be preserved for future generations.
How did the Memorial come into being? Seeing the collected paper clips the students wanted to do more. They wanted to honor the victims with a memorial. The principal suggested that the memorial would be more meaningful if the clips could be housed in an authentic German railroad car that had been used as a death car to transport victims to the camps. Transforming this car into a memorial would be a statement that evil can be overcome. With help from German citizens, in a drive headed by Peter Schroeder and Dagmar Schroeder Hildebrand, the school obtained an authentic German railroad transport car from the 1940's. Aided by the German government and the U.S. rail company CSX, the car traveled from Berlin to the tiny town of Whitwell. The students, staff, and community of Whitwell Middle School turned their dream into a reality by creating the "Children's Holocaust Memorial". This memorial was dedicated on November 9, 2001. It consists of the railcar surrounded by a small park containing eighteen butterflies in honor of the children of Terezin. The students, staff, and community of Whitwell Middle School truly believe that we can: "Change the World - One Paper Clip at a Time".
What's next? Presently the students by appointment conduct tours of the memorial for school groups and interested individuals. They have also prepared shetetl boxes that give the history of a Jewish community obliterated by Nazi actions and containing a paper clip for each soul in that community. Peter Schroeder and Dagmar Schroeder Hildebrand have included an article about the project in a civic text for German students as well as having written a book for German students describing Whitwell and the project. The Johnson Group in McLean, VA is preparing a documentary film to be distributed by Miramax chronicling the project and its impact on those involved.
At this time, the project has four goals.
Goal 1: To provide for the maintenance of the Memorial.
This will require approximately five thousand dollars ($5,000.00) per year for wood preservation materials, painting, rust proofing, grounds keeping, and minor repairs.
Goal 2: To catalogue the approximately thirty thousand (30,000) documents and letters that we have.
We have estimated this cost as approximately eight thousand dollars ($8,000.00). It is difficult to be accurate with this estimate because we want to organize and catalogue the material in a manner that will be useful to people interested in Holocaust studies. We also plan to put the materials on CD or DVD to make them easy to use.
Goal 3: To provide a small scholarship each year to a graduating senior who has been a member of the Holocaust study group. We want to encourage the students to further their education in hopes that they will be better prepared to fight intolerance.
Goal 4: To build a small facility to house our Holocaust materials so that they are readily available for people who are interested in studying our documents. We plan a building approximately 25 feet by 30 feet with 8-foot ceilings. Building costs in our area are presently about sixty dollars ($60.00) per square foot. The cost of the building would be approximately thirty five thousand dollars ($35,000).