There is a moving documentary that was shown on HBO last night. It's titled Paper Clips and it's about how some dedicated middle school teachers and students in tiny Whitwell, Tennessee learned about the Holocaust. Whitwell is a poor town of about 1600 people roughly 20 miles from Chattanooga. The town is almost 100% white and Protestant (there were only 6 blacks and 1 hispanic students in the middle school, with no Jews, Catholics, or other faiths living in the town). The teachers knew that the kids, growing up in that environment, would likely apply stereotypes to others just as others stereotype them as a "bunch of ignorant little redneck kids", to quote one of the teachers.

To try and grasp the magnitude of the Holocaust, they decided to collect 6 million paper clips (a symbol of resistance in Norway during the war). The story was picked up by a remarkable husband and wife team of German journalists and eventually the Washington Post and NBC News. Before it was over, they'd collected almost 30 million paper clips. One day, the school principal mentioned that she wished she could get one of those German railroad cars to display the clips as a memorial. The journalists helped them obtain the car and shipped it to Whitwell. It's now the central element in a children's Holocaust memorial.

This documentary is beautifully filmed with an excellent soundtrack. I watched it twice last night and plan on buying the DVD when it becomes available. It's by far the best movie of any kind that I've seen in a long time. The journalists, Dagmar Schroeder-Hildebrand and Peter Schroeder, have also written a companion book titled Six Million Paper Clips: The Making Of A Children's Holocaust Memorial.