Paperclips were created in Norway, and they were worn during the holocaust as a sign they were against it. The student having chosen to collect paperclips had no knowledge of this, and after they had started this discovered this. Then there was the location, a small town in the south that most of us had never heard of in Tennessee called Whitwell.
Who would have thought a small town where the majority of the people were the same race, and religion. The two main discriminations were unheard of to most of the kids. They could have thought everybody was the same since they had not had to experience much cultural differences in their community. The Schroeders were the first people to pick up on the project. They were both German, and reporters.
None of the big networks out there had picked this out yet they were the first ones. They found a cart that had carrier one hundred or more Jews in it, that supposedly did not exist. The fact that they found one was a miracle in itself. They received over twenty seven million paperclips. They thought they would need ten years to collect six million, and then they got twenty seven million in only 2 years.
During the holocaust eleven million people were murdered. Six million of them were Jews, and the other five million were gypsies, homosexuals, people with medical problems, and those who were helping the Jews. This was the “ultimate” outcome of racism because no matter how poorly they are treated in society, the worst possible thing that could happen to them through racism would be having their friends, and/or family killed, and also themselves. It has taken a big toll on modern society. The first obvious one is that there were six million Jews killed. That could have meant another six, ten, twenty million European Jews would be living now. The country of Germany itself has to apologize for it even though they had nothing to do with it.
Watch TrailerLeft, or right? Who would have thought that as a young child you would be asked the most important question of your life without thinking much of it? Upon arrival to the concentration camps with his mother, and little brother Samuel Sitko was asked this very same question. He answered “right”, and so he was sent to the right with his mother and brother forced left. His mother and brother were killed going left. This story touched me the most because he survived it, yet his family didn't. He being just a little boy at Auswitch and having his only known companions killed upon arrival is just sad. He toughed out the concentration camp alone, and now he's alive.
Some every day social prejudices have become socially acceptable because many people have experienced them daily or often enough to feel strongly about it, strong enough for them to persuade others into their thoughts. Some examples would be people in the south being thought of as hicks by people in the north, or we see prejudice in jobs. We seem to think certain jobs are man jobs, or woman jobs.
Some bad things have happened to me because of prejudicial thoughts. Things like what I wear can cause people to group me, what I do in my free time, where I hang out. All of these can cause me to be grouped unfairly with people doing the same thing as the people who made a mistake and now cause others to think of me as they do the person who screwed up. When we are baptized we remove our separation from God. As Catholics we all believe we are brothers and sisters of Christ.
Believing in this and then discriminating against other would be hypocritical and going against our beliefs. As Christian we should be striving to be models of Christ, and to achieve this we need to be trying to end discrimination, not globally, but in our daily lives. It harms God to see that we are not getting along together. His people hating against one another because of a physical, or other kind of attribute they cannot change.
