Fathoming the Unfathomable: Lessons from the Holocaust
Title: Fathoming the Unfathomable: Lessons from the Holocaust
Publication: Orange County Jewish Life
In the ongoing search for humanity and meaning forged from the ashes of the Holocaust, a group of students and dedicated teachers from a small town in rural Tennessee developed a pretty good lesson plan.
It’s a plan that required perseverance — and paper clips.
Six million paper clips, collected by the students and pondered as symbols of the many innocent lives lost at the hand of the Nazis. Paper clips were chosen as students discovered in Norway –- where the paper clip was invented – subversive citizens expressed their opposition to the Nazis by wearing paper clips on their lapels.
Paper Clips — shot over four years and released with the help of Miramax — is a moving, visceral documentary about tolerance and understanding. It’s also a an examination of unique lives crushed and now rediscovered by the predominately white, Christian children of Whitwell Middle School.
Winner of the best overall film at the Rome International Film Festival and a 2004 Jewish Image Award, it’s a story that follows the students efforts to fathom the unfathomable.
“What you’re seeing is really honest kids being raised by adults who feel that they have a responsibility of preparing them for life,” says writer and co-director Joe Fab.
“You see them act on what their hearts as well as their minds.”
The paper clip collecting begins modestly, as the film tracks the many twists and turns of such an ambitious project. Along the way, the audience hears firsthand accounts of Jewish American soldiers and survivors.
When two German journalists, a dedicated husband and wife team who remind the kids that all Germans are not monsters, visit Whitwell, the subsequent media buzz — including the Washington Post story that caught the eyes of Fab and producers Ari Daniel Pinchot and Robert Johnson — enable the students to continue.
Collecting paper clips from around the world, the school received thousands of thank-you letters and memories from survivors — along with 25 million paper clips.
When camp survivors visit Whitwell to recount their harrowing experiences, the school’s players decide to take the project in a bold new direction.
Led by Linda Hooper, the no-nonsense school principal, the teachers build a memorial to the victims of Hitler’s genocide. An old rail car, once used to transfer Jews to Auschwitz, is donated to the school and will now serve as a final resting place for the paper clips.
Reminding a new generation of the dangerous implications of hatred and anti-Semitism became something that brought town and the film crew together.
“When you follow people going through the kind of changes that they were going through in this film, you can’t help but go on that journey yourself,” says co-director Elliot Berling.
“Just feeling that I was connected to these people, who are supposedly very different than me, was a very profound experience,” he adds.
Originally intended as a modest PBS project, the film, like the paper clip collecting, took on a life of its own.
“We thought we’d be down there for a few months,” says Fab. “Who knew we’d end up there for a few years?”
Fab’s surprise might also echo the astonishment of the audience meeting a small town in rural Tennessee that would build a stirring monument to a group of people it once hardly knew.
HIDING & SEEKING
Another important documentary about the lessons of tolerance after World War II is Menachem Daum’s Hiding and Seeking.
Winner of the Grand Prix Award at the 2004 Warshaw International Film Festival, and a recipient at the 2004 Jewish Image Awards, the film, show primarily over the course of two trips to Poland, is an exhaustive and emotional testament to the power of goodness.
The film follows Daum’s search for a couple that hid his father during the German occupation.
Alarmed by violent aftershocks of religious extremism — including his own adult Orthodox sons’ increasing mistrust of the non-Jewish world and the religiously “narrow” manner in which his grandchildren were being raised — Daum searched for people who had risked their lives to help Jews.
Along the way, his own mistrust of Polish people and their complicity with the Nazis was something the director felt that he had to overcome.
“Poles were the ultimate others,” says Daum.
“My parents really felt betrayed by the majority of the Poles during the occupation, and I grew up with stories of how the Poles were collaborators with the Nazis,” he says. “But we went to Poland and found some very decent people.”
Those people included a family of farmers who had risked their lives to hide Daum’s father-in-law.
When one of his sons tells Daum his trip to Poland is “completely ridiculous, like the film,” the enormity of Daum’s quest comes full circle. It’s emblematic of the Jewish struggle to retain faith and tolerance in the wake of incomprehensive evil, and among a divided family.
Mentored by the late Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, Daum attributes much of the genesis of his inspiration to the philosophy of Carlebach – an Orthodox leader known for his humanity in reaching out to people of all faiths.
“He taught me about the great potential for goodness in all humans,” says Daum.
Daum sees a connection between this film and his previous work, A Life Apart: Hasidism in America.
“If the first film was an attempt to humanize the ultra-Orthodox community to the outside world, this film was an attempt to humanize the world to my ultra-Orthodox sons.”