Life-lessons from the Holocaust

By Kim Shippey

If ever you need convincing that good can come out of evil, buy a ticket for Paper Clips, a Miramax documentary (shot on video) due for release in American theaters next month. It was directed by Elliot Berlin and Joe Fab (also the screenwriter).

The film is set in the town of Whitwell, which has just two traffic lights but lots of cows. It's a poor community of about two thousand people, nestled in the mountains of Tennessee. Its citizens are almost exclusively white and Christian.

One day in 1998, the Whitwell Middle School principal, Linda Hooper, decided to open her students' eyes to the diversity of the world beyond their insulated valley. She and two of the teachers came up with a Holocaust project that would honor the six million Jews who died at the hands of the Nazis. For the eighth-grade kids, this was a completely unfamiliar chapter in history, but one to which they readily applied their unprejudiced minds.

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