A small Tennessee middle school that is 98% white and Christian has found something else to unite its student body: full-time dedication to building a one-of-a-kind Holocaust memorial to the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis. The students embarked on the project almost three years ago, and are now almost halfway there: They are attempting to collect six million paper clips which they hope to put on display in an authentic German railroad car used to transport the prisoners to the death camps.



The school\'s principal, in the small town of Whitwell (population: 1,600) believes that because of the school\'s lack of cultural diversity, \"We just have to give our children a broader view of the world. We have to crack the shell of their white cocoon, to enable them to survive in the world out there.\" When one teacher suggested a voluntary course on the Holocaust, the parents, with only slight hesitations, agreed, and the studies began. \"What gripped the eighth-graders most,\" the Washington Post recently reported, \"was the sheer number of dead. Six million.\" They tried to imagine what this number really meant as they continued their Holocaust studies. When they learned one day that many courageous Norwegians expressed solidarity with the Jews by pinning paper clips to their lapels, one girl said, \"Let\'s collect six million paper clips and turn them into a sculpture to remember the victims.\" And so it was decided.



One change was instituted many months later, however. As hundreds and thousands of paper clips began to be donated and collected, the students saw that many clips were given in memory of specific Holocaust victims. They therefore decided that melting them into a statue would be inconceivable. Each paper clip should represent one victim, the students believed, and so they decided to turn an authentic German railroad car from the 1940\'s into a museum that would house all the paper clips, with glass walls so that visitors could walk through. For more information on this unique project, see \"/www.marionschools.org/holocaust/default.htm\".