Bravo to the kids, teachers and staff at Westview Hills Middle School in Willowbrook, Illinois – they just set a new standard for presenting Prisoner of Her Past in class.
The teachers and social workers at Westview didn’t just show the film (on Jan. 12) and ask for questions. Instead, they convened all the eighth graders in the school, then screened the movie in three segments. In between, they discussed Prisoner of Her Past in small groups.
By the time I stood in front of 150 students, they were bursting with ideas, observations and an outpouring of inquiries. Such as:
“Why does your mother keep saying in the film, ‘I’m a married woman, I’m married to one man?’”
“Did your mother tell your father what happened to her?”
“How did you feel when you got to Dubno, and what were conditions there like?”
“What happened to your father during World War II, and did he have PTSD?”
“Did your mother scare you?”
“Why didn’t you notice your mother’s strange behavior when you were a kid?”
“How did your family react to you telling this story?”
“Have you ever met an ex-Nazi?”
The discussion ran over an hour. Afterward, kids came up to me, shook my hand and said they were going to download the book that inspired the film.
Eighth graders have come a long way since I was in school.
A few days later, I received a deliciously fat package in the mail stuffed with cards and comments from the kids. These are keepers.
Thanks to school social worker Debbie Collins and her colleagues for putting this together.
I learned a lot.
- Howard Reich
