Two East Ayrshire teachers want to use paperclips to make pupils more aware of the suffering inflicted by the Nazis.
The Paperclips Project is inspired by Norwegians who, in the 1940s, wore paperclips as a silent protest against the Nazi regime in their country. Organisers hope to amass one million, representing Holocaust victims.
Lauren Dixon, an English teacher at Kilmarnock’s Grange Academy, and Katie Winterburn, a history teacher at Cumnock Academy, went on a Learning and Teaching Scotland trip to Berlin in May 2009. They visited the Jewish Museum, Sachsenhausen concentration camp, the Holocaust Memorial and the Anne Frank Centre.
They hope the paperclips collected by schoolchildren in East Ayrshire will form a permanent memorial to the Holocaust. A similar project in 1998 saw Whitwell Middle School, in Tennessee in the United States, collect 30 million paperclips. Some 11 million are stored in a German railway transport car on the school grounds.
