By Marisa Iati, Staff Writer
MONROE — Casey Condra was an eighth-grade student at Whitwell Middle School in Tennessee when the school engaged in an ambitious project: collecting six million paper clips to represent the six million Jews that perished in the Holocaust.
Monday night, Mr. Condra spoke to a room packed with people at the Chabad Jewish Center of Monroe. Before his talk, the center screened the film, “Paper Clips,” which chronicles the school’s initiative.
”If you want to make a difference, even if it’s something small, as small as a paper clip, you can literally impact the entire world,” Rabbi Eliezer Zaklikovsky said before showing the film. “The lesson is one of perseverance to do something good for people. The goodwill will continue and continue and continue to reverberate.”
In the film, Whitwell Middle School’s then-principal, Linda Hooper, said because Whitwell was a very homogeneous community, teachers wanted to demonstrate to students not everyone is like them and show what occurs when prejudice goes unchecked.
The teachers delivered lessons about the Holocaust. When one student said that, because of the enormity of the number, she could not internalize six million Jews had been killed, the teachers began The Holocaust Project.
Over the next few years, the eighth-grade students collected more than 29 million paper clips. They stored 11 million — to represent the Jews, homosexuals, gypsies and Jehovah’s Witnesses who died — in a German rail car that now serves as a memorial.
In addition to the millions of supportive letters the students received during the project, they also received nine that denied the Holocaust ever happened or asked why the school was picking on the German race, according to Mr. Condra.
Mr. Condra said The Holocaust Project united the city of Whitwell.
”Even today you can still feel it in the air whenever you mention The Holocaust Project, the paper clips,” he said.
Mr. Condra said the students and teachers hope tours of the memorial rail car will continue long into the future. He added The Holocaust Project has given him the courage to be a better public speaker.
”My job right now consists of meeting new clients, taking clients out to dinner, out to golf, and the reason I’ve got that job is because I am able to talk comfortably in front of people,” he said. “That would never have been true, coming from Whitwell, without this project.”
The Holocaust Project was on the minds of many people in Whitwell from 2000 to 2008, but has begun to fade from public discussion, Mr. Condra said.
”The actual talk about it has died down,” he said. “It’s almost as if people have started to go back into their norm stages. And that’s what we’re trying to work on now is keeping that momentum going.”
Mr. Condra closed his talk by asking audience members to pass along the message of the project.
”Please remember: time does not repeat itself, but man does,” he said.
Ruth Adler, a Jewish German who hid in a convent during the Holocaust, also spoke.
”One of my first memories is that of two uniformed men standing at our apartment door, telling my parents to pack up quickly, take whatever they could carry with them and get out of that apartment because they were going to be deported to Poland,” she said.
She and her parents escaped from the line for the train that would take them to Poland. Ms. Adler, then a young child, eventually was hidden in a convent where she pretended to be a French orphan. She and her parents all survived Hitler’s time in power.
”We were very lucky,” Ms. Adler said.
