An Unimaginably Vast Number: An Exclusive Guest Post from Gordon Korman, Author of Linked, Our July Young Reader Pick
Debug Notice: No product response from API
Our very first ever Young Reader Monthly Pick was also a book by Gordon Korman — The Unteachables — so we feel like we’ve come full circle with Linked. When swastikas start popping up around a small town, the kids of one school start a project to try to bring people together while three students get closer to the truth. A thought-provoking story about one town’s reckoning with crimes of both the present and past, Korman seamlessly blends together humor, mystery, and action. Keep reading for to hear from Gordon Korman about the story that inspired him to write Linked.
Our very first ever Young Reader Monthly Pick was also a book by Gordon Korman — The Unteachables — so we feel like we’ve come full circle with Linked. When swastikas start popping up around a small town, the kids of one school start a project to try to bring people together while three students get closer to the truth. A thought-provoking story about one town’s reckoning with crimes of both the present and past, Korman seamlessly blends together humor, mystery, and action. Keep reading for to hear from Gordon Korman about the story that inspired him to write Linked.
Linked was inspired by the famous Paper Clips Project, by eighth graders from Whitwell Middle School in Whitwell, Tennessee in 1998. During an after-school Holocaust unit, the students became hung up on the idea of six million — the number of Jewish lives lost to the Nazi regime. The kids’ take on it, to me, was pure genius: They all knew what six million was; they understood the number. But none of them had any idea what six million of something actually looked like. They decided the best way for them to study the Holocaust was to collect six million of something.
They chose paper clips because the citizens of Norway wore paper clips to protest the Nazi occupation during World War II. It was the perfect thing to collect – both small and cheap. You could walk into a store and buy a box of a hundred paper clips that fit in the palm of your hand. What they soon discovered was that, even a hundred at a time, it was extremely hard to get to six million paper clips. The number was just that gigantic. Realistically, they never would have gotten close, except that word of their project spread like wildfire. As we’d say today, it went viral, even before the golden age of social media. People all around the world contributed paper clips — and much more — to Whitwell’s collection.
That project eventually became Whitwell’s world-renowned Children’s Holocaust Memorial, housed in an actual Nazi railcar that was once used to deport German Jews to the concentration camps. The car holds eleven million paper clips, representing the six million murdered Jews plus five million non-Jewish victims of the Nazi regime.
In the end, the eighth graders of Whitwell collected more than thirty million paper clips and inspired several books and at least two feature films. In Linked, when the students of Chokecherry embark on a tolerance education unit in response to the swastika defacing their wall, there’s no question that the accomplishments of their fellow middle schoolers in Tennessee would be among the first topics they’d study. And as the racist vandalism continues, it makes perfect sense that the Chokecherry kids might try to follow in the footsteps of their Whitwell predecessors with their own version of the project — a paper chain six million links long. Then they can begin to learn what the Paper Clips Project taught us all: That the first step in wrapping your mind around the unimaginably vast tragedy of the Holocaust is to wrap your mind around that unimaginably vast number of six million.
In Linked, Michael Amorosa says, “A paper chain can be done when it hits a certain number of links. But tolerance is a project you always have to keep working at.” It’s my favorite line in the book.
I hope you enjoy LINKED.