Culture of Marion County, Tennessee

The Paper Clips Project

A Holocaust remembrance project at Whitwell Middle School

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Last updated: April 23, 2026

The Paper Clips Project is a Holocaust education and remembrance effort carried out at Whitwell Middle School in Whitwell, Marion County. What began in 1998 as a voluntary after-school class for eighth graders became an international phenomenon, drawing millions of paper clips, tens of thousands of letters, and worldwide media attention to a small community on the Cumberland Plateau. The project produced one of the most unusual Holocaust memorials in the United States: an authentic German railway transport car filled with 11 million paper clips, each one representing a life lost. A 2004 documentary brought the story to a national audience and earned multiple awards, including an Emmy nomination.

Origin (1998)

The project traces its beginning to Linda M. Hooper, principal of Whitwell Middle School. In 1998, Hooper asked Assistant Principal David Smith to develop a voluntary after-school project that would teach tolerance to students. Smith, together with teacher Sandra Roberts, designed a Holocaust education class. The class launched in the fall of 1998, meeting after school with interested eighth graders.

Whitwell with the Cumberland Plateau rising behind
Whitwell, Tennessee, with the Cumberland Plateau rising in the background. Photo: Brian Stansberry, 2015 (CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons).

As students learned about the Holocaust, they found it difficult to grasp the scale of the killing. Six million was an abstract number to children in a rural Tennessee school. One student proposed a concrete way to understand it: collect six million of something. The question became what to collect.

The Norwegian Connection

David Smith turned to the internet for ideas and discovered a detail from the history of the Norwegian resistance during World War II. During the Nazi occupation of Norway, citizens wore paper clips on their lapels as a quiet act of defiance and solidarity. The paper clip had been popularized (though not invented) by a Norwegian, Johan Vaaler, and the small metal fastener became a symbol of national unity. The Norwegian word for paper clip, binders, carried a double meaning, connoting solidarity: "we are bound together."

The connection between the paper clip and resistance to Nazism gave the students their answer. They would collect paper clips. Their goal: six million, one for every Jewish victim of the Holocaust.

How the Project Grew

Word of the collection spread quickly. What started as a classroom exercise in a school of roughly 400 students soon attracted attention far beyond Marion County. Paper clips began arriving from every state in the country and from more than 100 countries. Letters accompanied many of the shipments, some from Holocaust survivors, some from heads of state, and some from ordinary people moved by the students' effort.

By the time the project reached its peak, Whitwell Middle School had received over 30 million paper clips and more than 30,000 letters. The volume of mail overwhelmed the tiny Whitwell post office. Packages arrived in grocery bags, shoeboxes, and industrial containers.

The German Railcar

As the collection grew past its original six-million goal, the question of how to display the clips took on new urgency. The answer came in the form of an authentic German railway transport car, the kind of cattle car used during the Holocaust to carry prisoners to concentration camps across occupied Europe.

The railcar was shipped across the Atlantic and arrived at the seaport in Baltimore on September 9, 2001, just two days before the September 11 attacks. Despite the chaos that followed, the car was eventually transported overland from Baltimore to Whitwell, where it would become the centerpiece of the memorial.

German journalists Peter W. Schroeder and Dagmar Schroeder-Hildebrand documented both the project and the railcar's transatlantic journey. Their account became the book Six Million Paper Clips: The Making of a Children's Holocaust Memorial, published by Kar-Ben Publishing in 2004.

The Children's Holocaust Memorial (November 9, 2001)

The memorial was unveiled on November 9, 2001, a date chosen for its significance: it was the anniversary of Kristallnacht, the coordinated anti-Jewish pogrom of November 9, 1938, widely considered a turning point toward the Holocaust. The ceremony took place on the grounds of Whitwell Middle School.

Inside the German railcar, the school placed 11 million paper clips. Six million represented the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. The remaining five million honored the other groups targeted by the Nazi regime: Roma, Catholics, Jehovah's Witnesses, LGBT people, people with disabilities, and others. Each clip stood for one life.

The memorial stands on the grounds of Whitwell Middle School and remains open to visitors.

The Paper Clips Documentary (2004)

The project's story reached its widest audience through a feature-length documentary. The film began when Rachel Pinchot read a Washington Post article about the Whitwell project and shared it with her husband, Ari Daniel Pinchot. They connected with filmmaker Elliot Berlin, who traveled to Whitwell and produced a seven-minute demonstration reel.

Matthew Hiltzik, then at Miramax, championed the project. Berlin and writer/producer Joe Fab co-directed the full documentary. Over the course of production, the team accumulated roughly 150 hours of footage. The resulting film, simply titled Paper Clips, follows the students, their teachers, and Holocaust survivors from New York who traveled to rural Tennessee to meet the children and see the memorial firsthand.

Release and reception

The film was first screened in Whitwell in November 2003. It premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival on May 2, 2004, and received a wide theatrical release on September 8, 2004, distributed by Slowhand Cinema Releasing. At the box office, Paper Clips earned approximately $1.2 million, a strong return for a low-budget documentary.

Additional producers included Robert M. Johnson and Ari Daniel Pinchot.

Awards and honors

Legacy and Continuing Impact

More than two decades after the memorial's unveiling, visitors continue to arrive at Whitwell Middle School from across the United States and from abroad. The Children's Holocaust Memorial remains a working educational site. School groups, families, and individual travelers make the trip to the small Sequatchie Valley community to see the railcar and the memorial grounds.

The project's ongoing programming is organized through the school and through One Clip at a Time, the nonprofit organization formed in the years after the memorial's unveiling to sustain Holocaust education resources tied to the Whitwell story. The memorial is generally open to the public during school hours, with guided tours available on request. The Whitwell Middle School campus also hosts annual commemorations on Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, and on the November 9 anniversary of Kristallnacht, the date the memorial was unveiled in 2001.

The project has been the subject of extensive academic study. Daniel H. Magilow examined its place in the broader landscape of Holocaust memorialization in a 2007 article for Jewish Social Studies, noting how the act of counting, of making each victim tangible through a physical object, gave students and visitors a way to confront numbers that otherwise resist comprehension.

The Paper Clips Project put Whitwell and Marion County on the map in a way that no one in the community anticipated. It demonstrated that meaningful engagement with history does not require proximity to the events themselves, and that a small school in rural Appalachia could build something of lasting significance.

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