A nice showing joined us last night at Chabad of Uptown for an evening of the traditional reading of Eicha-Lamentations on the 9th of Av and a screening of the film Paper Clips Project. This day is when we traditionally mourn the destruction of the Temple and all the subsequent tragedies to befall the Jewish people, including the Holocaust.
UH Professor of History Barbara Hales introduced the film. Barbara's publications focus on film history, cultural studies, and intellectual history of the Weimar Republic.
The following is her introduction.
Remembering the Past: Issues in Holocaust Education
By Dr. Barbara Hales
I wanted to begin by saying a few words about the academic study of the Holocaust before moving on to introduce the compelling true account presented in the film Paper Clips.
Holocaust studies is straddled by a debate regarding how one represents the Holocaust both as an historical event and in literary, artistic, and documentary works that attempt in some way to memorialize the Holocaust. The philosopher Theodor Adorno presents the most skeptical view of our ability to engage in Holocaust studies in the manner of other academic studies arguing that: “The world of Auschwitz lies outside of speech as it lies outside of reason.” Similarly, Hannah Arendt, in her essay “The Image of Hell,” cautions that the Holocaust narrative is unrepresentable, deeming that there is no iconic image able to reflect the “obliteration of human death.”
Representing a more moderate position, David Bathrick notes that while we must rely upon archival images as an historical document, these same images also have the tendency to become voyeuristic bordering on the pornographic; he writes that images of the camps, taken in 1945, offer verification and bear witness to the event, but there are “limits” to Holocaust representation, with areas of taboo including the overplaying of violence, dead bodies, etc. (“negative sublime”- Arendt).
With this academic debate about methodology in mind, let us now consider Holocaust education both within the Jewish community and beyond. The central message of Holocaust education within the Jewish community is “to always remember and to never forget.” Scholarly history tells a linear narrative of events, but Jewish history is one of synchronic time—at once we live in a past history, a present world, and a future world of which we hope and pray for redemption. This unique sense of temporality means that we share in the miracle of the splitting of the Red Sea and the revelation at Mount Sinai, but also in the tragedies of our past as we today celebrate the destruction of the first and second temples.
So too, we should remember and never forget the Holocaust as if we were there in the death camps. This charge, this imperative upon every Jew is a greater and greater challenge in our own day as the generation that endured the death camps is dwindling leaving us to tell their stories and to be their collective memories.
The title and central metaphor of Paper Clips poignantly frames the question of memory. How easily we clean out a desk drawer and toss out some worthless paper clips. This scrap of metal might have had some value when it bound together an important document, but is nothing more than trash when it has become unfastened.
A fellow faculty member at the university where I teach once asked me why I’m teaching a university course on the Holocaust. Presumably, a class on World War II would make sense, but not one entitled Holocaust. Did I actually have to explain to her that Jewish genocide is a subject for all students—of all backgrounds and all faiths—to learn about? The film Paper Clips demonstrates that sometimes a schoolchild is better able to comprehend something than a Ph.D.
Paper Clips (2004), recounts the story of a middle school in Tennessee that takes on a project of collecting paper clips (30 million to date) in order to remember those who perished in the Holocaust. This symbol was borrowed from the Norwegians, who wore paper clips on their lapels to protest Nazi occupation during World War II. In this small Christian town of Whitwell, population 1600, this project was designed in 1998 by principal Linda Hooper to promote ethnic, religious, and cultural diversity. The learning here not only covered the history lesson, but also promoted soul searching within the community, including the vice-principal’s mention of the racist jokes his father used to make, and the fear that the area would be branded as red neck. (by the way, The Ku Klux Klan was born 100 miles from this community of Whitwell, in Pulaski, TN). Here past intolerances reflected in lessons of the Shoah create learning tools for present day tolerance. Others carelessly toss out a paper clip as a worthless scrap of metal, but the children of this small town in the deep South bind the story to the clip, elevating and imbuing each one as a symbol of the precious lives that were lost.
On Tishab’Av, we commemorate the destruction of the first and second temples of past ages. This ongoing tragedy of living in exile, however, calls us as a people to perform mitzvot and acts of loving kindness in the present in order to hasten redemption. The story of Paper Clips responds to the tragedy of the Holocaust with positive actions. Even the simplest school child has the power to transform the world with knowledge of the past. Thus truth is found in the “past’s reverberation with the present” (Williams, “Mirrors without Memories” 20). Let’s always remember and never forget.