I’ll admit it, I didn’t want to go to this talk, but
it was the only choice since it was a keynote event. I grudgingly
took my seat among other presenters and attendees at The Third
Annual North American Conference on the Spirituality of Children & Youth.
I had reveled in the presentations of Jean Houston, PMH Atwater,
Tobin Hart and a host of other inspiring speakers, but my mind
couldn’t wrap itself around the connection of the Holocaust
and the spirituality of children.
Linda Hooper, Principal of the Whitwell Middle School in the
small town of Whitwell, Tennessee (pop. 1600) explained to us
that she wanted to expand the horizons of her students. This
is an Evangelical Christian, mostly white, farming community
with a median education level of 6.6 years. These kids are basically
alike, there is no racial or ethnic intolerance because everyone
is the same. In his search for an appropriate project, David
Smith, Associate Principal became inspired by a Holocaust survivor’s speech at a teacher-training
course in Chattanooga in 1998. The decision was made to teach the
students about the Holocaust and the issues of hate and intolerance.
Initially Smith’s project added texts such as Anne Frank’s
Diary of a Young Girl and Elie Wiesel’s Night to the curriculum.
The students also watched “Schindler’s List” and
learned about Judaism. Six million deaths kept coming up and
the children had difficulty fathoming that large a number. They
asked if they could collect something to give them an idea of
what six million looked like. Principal, Linda Hooper insisted
that it must be relevant to the issue, so paperclips were chosen
as a representation because they were worn on the collars of
Norwegians during World War II to silently protest the Nazis.
What began as a trickle of paper clips, turned into a flood
when 94 year-old Holocaust Survivor Lena Gitter learned of the
project. Gitter alerted two German journalists who subsequently
filed stories about the project in Europe and wrote a book entitled
The Paper Clip Project. Letters and emails poured in accompanied
the deluge of paper clips. The most meaningful for the students,
were those sent by relatives of Holocaust victims, usually containing
paper clips along with the names of those who were lost. None
of Whitwell’s
students had ever met a Jewish person prior to the start of the
project.
The project did not end with the paper clips. The children
arranged for a delivery of a cattle car that was used to haul
the Holocaust victims to concentration camps to use in their
project.
Linda Hooper and the children touched my heart, probably more
than anything I could have imagined. Thank you Tobin and Mary
Hart for the opportunity to learn on a deep level about the children
and about truly “Sending Our Love Into the Future.”
 Sherry
Henderson, Editor |
