Monthly Archives: March 2007

This is not really a movie.

It is a documentary about a little school in Whitwell, Tennessee.

The movie is called “Paper Clips” and is about the a small middle school that took on a challenge to create a visual representation of the six million Jews that were murdered in Hitler’s “Final Solution.”

In watching this movie for the second time, I was reminded of how I felt when was young, and I first started to grasp the sheer scope of what happened during the Holocaust. Not understanding the volume of people… men, women, and children… that lost their lives to the ideals of a ethnically pure race that Hitler wanted to create… yet in which he did not even live up to.

Paper Clips is inspiring in that you see the amount of support that pours out to this group of kids as they go further and further in to the project, and not only do they learn about the Holocaust, but they learn about themselves as well.

I feel that it is important that people watch movies like this. It is important that people feel the pain of seeing the gaunt, almost lifeless faces of the people that came out of the camps as survivors, as well as the pictures of the people lying in the trenches getting ready to be buried.

It is also fair, and I would be closed minded not to mention, the several million non-jews that were “exterminated” in this campaign. The Gays, the Gypsies, and all the other people that lost their lives for no reason more important than they were not Arian.

It is important that these pictures be burned into our minds, and that they evoke tears and pain when we see them. That is a sign that we are compassionate humans, and that we understand that what was done, cannot and should not happen again.

There are many people out there, maybe you reading this are one of them, that claim that the Holocaust never happened, and that it is all an elaborate hoax. You are free to your opinion, but when there is this must proof to the contrary, then how can you buy that? Look at the survivors, look at the US, British and Russian soldiers that liberated the camps as they pushed through to beat the Nazis down. The stories they tell, and the sights they saw were not in their own imagination, they were real. So if you are one of the people that does not think that the Holocaust took place, then my advise to you is to stop listening to the talking heads that feed it to you, and go back to school, if for no other reason than to take a history class. Better yet, take a trip to Germany or Poland, and visit places like Auschwitz.

I encourage everyone to watch Paper Clips. It will make you cry, make you laugh, and in the end, it will give you a good feeling. You will see kids that are learning about something that helped to make them responsible people, and, hopefully, more compassionate adults.