You wouldn’t know it to talk to me, but I was in a French magnet program. I took many years of French. At the time, I was scared to speak it and, frankly, I just thought I was “bad at languages.” Then, when I graduated high school, it suddenly clicked. I had a level of fluency that was minimal, but adequate. The brain works in mysterious ways.
But the best thing I got out of French class wasn’t my ability to kill it in 1st grade French on Duolingo 27 years later, but a love of international film during my teenage years that deepened my humanity and understanding of history.
As a way to process their experiences, Europeans became low-key obsessed with making WWII films. The arthouse movies with personal stories or creative approaches had a lasting impression and emotional resonance for me, more so than the bigger budget films like American-made Schindler’s List (1993) and even Life Is Beautiful (La Vita è Bella) (1997) with Roberto Benigni.
While the kids in the German language program at my high school watched Das Boot (a 1981 film that takes place in a submarine with some homoerotic undertones), the French students were encouraged by our wonderful teachers to rent 1987’s Au Revoir Les Enfants.
It’s based on the experiences of famed director Louis Malle (he was married to actress Candice Bergen, AKA Murphy Brown) and tells the story of a French priest who sheltered Jewish children during the war. The priest and the children were caught and sent to death camps. Au Revoir Les Enfants — which is what the brave priest says as he’s carted away — is a gorgeous depiction of boyhood, friendship, and bravery that really drives home the horrors of gen0cide and ethnic cleansing through thoughtful storytelling. Another must-see film is Europa Europa (1991), a riveting story about a Jewish teenager who flees Germany and eventually has to pose as a N@zi Youth to survive.
I recently learned that there are people in the U.S. who aren’t being taught about the holocaust in public schools. (And we wonder why we’re in trouble.) So, a little background for those people: Around six million Jewish people and other groups like LGBTQ+ people, people with disabilities, Roma (gypsy) people, and political dissidents were tortured and killed in a variety of horrific ways by the Germany state from the early 1930s to 1945. How could schools omit this atrocity? It’s beyond me. It was less than 100 years ago!
I can’t say when I first learned about the holocaust, but I learned a lot about it. I read The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank in middle school and grew up watching PBS in Miami where there’s a big Jewish community. In high school, I visited Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Israel, on a family trip to the West Bank.
But I think the storytelling of cinema was the most effective teacher, and might be for an audience of kids who are growing up with nonstop screens at school and at home. At a time when U.S. schools are being targeted for inclusive approaches to teaching and books are being banned, movies can provide teens not only with critical historical information, but an emotional understanding of history so that they don’t repeat it.
For those paying attention, it may be too late or maybe this is our last chance to show the next generation what’s at stake.
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