PUTNEY — The documentary film Paperclips will run at Next Stage on Thursday, May 2, 7 p.m., in recognition of Holocaust Remembrance Week, hosted by the Brattleboro Area Jewish Community.
Tickets are by donation at the door or at nextstagearts.org.
The film shows how, to teach their middle school students about the scale of the Holocaust, a principal and two key staff members at a school in Whitwell, Tenn., devised a class project involving paperclips designed in Norway by a Jewish man and worn as a sign of resistance there during World War II.
The school, located in a rural, heavily Christian community, decided to collect 6 million paperclips as a way to represent the magnitude of the mass murder of Jews by Hitler. Instead, they received 29 million paperclips, as word of their project grew with the help of two German newspaper correspondents stationed in Washington, D.C., whose story about the project was read worldwide.
The 2004 film's depiction of the four years that followed is remarkable and deeply moving, culminating in the students - most of whom had never met a Jew - setting up a campus Holocaust museum in a boxcar used to deport Jews to concentration camps so that they can educate others about the mass slaughter, not only of Jews but of homosexuals, gypsies, and other minorities murdered by the Nazis.
In all, 11 million paperclips are in the museum, one for every person murdered, along with other items of remembrance.
The students met and bonded with Holocaust survivors; teachers, other adults, and students began to recognize and acknowledge their own prejudices. A suitcase arrived at the post office filled with Holocaust memorabilia. A train delivered the boxcar, secured by the German journalists.
All of this is captured in real time by filmmakers Joe Fab and Elliot Berlin in a moving testament to the importance of Holocaust Memorial Day.