Paper Clips Project - Expansion of The Project

Expansion of The Project

Wayne MacIntyre, a teacher from Herring Cove Junior High (Nova Scotia, Canada) took the idea from a US school and called it the Paperclips Extension Project. After coming back from a tour of the Holocaust concentration camps in Poland during 2006, MacIntyre wanted to undertake a project with his Herring Cove students that would help them understand the Second World War’s horrors. He decided to use a similar concept to that used by Whitwell Middle School in Tennessee. In 1998, students there placed millions of paper clips on a German transport car – each paperclip representing an individual murdered in the Holocaust. But MacIntyre wanted to make each paperclip visible. So he had his English students string them together and hang them from the ceiling in his classroom. In 2007 there are 100,000 paper clips in the room. Like hooking the paper clips together, MacIntyre started hooking other ideas together. Students had suggestions of their own and they began to add these to their paperclip room. When the project was finished, the room was a miniature museum with displays, posters and photographs on the walls. The students planned to open the museum for a day but ended up keeping it open for a few weeks. Members of the community would visit and walk through.

In the summer of 2008 MacIntyre presented his idea in Jerusalem during International Conference on the Holocaust and Education. One of the listeners was a young history teacher from Croatia. Miljenko Hajdarovic, a teacher at Senkovec Primary School, who started a project called “Classroom Holocaust Museum”. With a group of 25 pupils he collected 153.000 paper clips as a main exhibit in their small museum. The museum was opened on 27th of January 2009. The museum contained paper clip chains, photos, different objects connected with the subject (an old camera, a phone, broken glass as a symbol of Kristallnacht, a travel bag, bunch of shoes, a rice bowl as a symbol of the daily allowable amount of food...). On the day of the opening the students hosted Oto Konstein, a survivor of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. His testimony was recorded and was distributed on DVD to 30 schools in Medjimurje County.