Now toured by school groups and other visitors, the memorial is surrounded by landscaping and three twisted-copper butterflies, with other butterfly forms inlaid into the sidewalk around the rail car. The art is inspired by the well known poem of Pavel Friedmann, a child in Terezin: “The last, the very last, So richly, brightly, dazzlingly yellow… Only I never saw another butterfly. That butterfly was the last one. Butterflies don’t live in here, in the ghetto.”
Eleven million paper clips are displayed in the rail car, representing six million Jews and five million victims from other groups singled out for persecution by the Nazis. After the completion of the filming, a pyramidal sculpture was added. Surrounded by additional “flying” butterflies, it too is filled with 11 million paper clips.
Joining the exhibit in the rail car is a medium-size suitcase, old and worn. Inside are paper clips with individual notes to Anne Frank. The young student writers, in German, describe their personal feelings about what happened during the Nazi era, even asking for Anne’s forgiveness. The German children had learned of the project and decided to participate in their own unique way.
One of the messages the film conveys is that ideas, even simple ones, can grow to unexpected proportions. During the Holocaust this is what happened. Evil grew and then grew more, and enveloped all. In Whitwell – and this is a word that is used a lot in written discussion of the film – it was goodness that spread, even bringing visitors to the town. A group of survivors from The Greater Five Towns Y in Cedarhurst, New York, traveled to Whitwell to meet the students and the community and to share their testimony. This visit, understandably, provides some of the more emotional moments in the film. For the students, these visitors were living paper clips.
The makers of the film have spoken of the challenges they faced bringing “Paper Clips” to the screen. They had read a major article that appeared in The Washington Post and the humanity of the story struck a chord. Still, they didn’t know if this was film material or “just a good episode for a magazine show.” And they didn’t know how the story would actually turn out, if the goal of six million paper clips would be met.
The school, too, was hesitant. Linda Hooper, the principal, and David Smith, the assistant principal, football coach and one of the co-teachers of the program, were concerned that an inaccurate portrayal of kids from the South could result. Media coverage of Southern and rural communities, they knew, could be unflattering. Even with this project, they’d experienced it.
The filmmakers, Joe Fab and Elliott Berlin, met with Hooper, won her over, and that evening met with the school board. The response was unanimously in favor, and so began a two year effort to record the events as they happened and to incorporate the wealth of material already available, especially the letters. The strong bond and trust that developed between the filmmakers and the school community is evident in the many candid moments caught on film, and also in the scheduled or planned ones, such as the interviews, still real and still capable of surprise.
In one of the interviews, David Smith, the teacher, speaks openly of his own tinges of prejudice and that of his father’s, and his hope that his own children will learn from him a different lesson, the one he was now teaching his students in the classroom. It was Smith who’d come back from a Chattanooga teacher-training seminar in the summer of 1998 with the suggestion to teach the Holocaust as a way of instilling in students an appreciation for diversity and tolerance.