In Whitwell, Tennessee, a mostly white, Christian, rural community with almost no exposure to Jewish culture or the Holocaust, middle school teachers launch a project to help students grasp the scale of six million deaths. The class settles on collecting paper clips, one for each victim, after learning that Norwegians wore them as a silent protest against Nazi occupation. The number seems abstract until the clips start arriving by the thousands, then millions, mailed in from around the world with letters attached. Survivors travel to the school to speak directly to the students, and two German journalists who cover the story end up helping source an actual rail car used to transport prisoners, which is installed on school grounds and packed with the collected clips as a permanent memorial. The film follows teachers, students, and townspeople as an assignment about tolerance turns into a community-wide reckoning with a history none of them lived through, told mostly through classroom scenes, interviews, and the growing pile of paper clips itself.