Last Sunday on Holocaust Remembrance Day, I had the pleasure of attending a screening for Chicago-based Kartemquin Films’ newest documentary, Prisoner of Her Past, at the Gene Siskel Film Center.   The film eloquently tells the broken tale of Sonia Reich, a Holocaust survivor whose seemingly normal post-war life in America has, for 60 years, cautiously masked a horrific childhood in Eastern Europe about which she has persistently resisted discussion.

Sonia’s son Howard Reich, a Chicago Tribune jazz critic, became inspired to investigate his mother’s mysterious past nine years ago after Sonia made a brief habit of packing her bags and leaving her Skokie, Illinois, home in the dark of the night, claiming that the Nazis were trying to kill her.

The adorable, elderly woman in a nursing home that we see the film is likeable and quite comical – speaking casually in a tiny-voiced accent about her soda preferences or eating pumpernickel bread with a straw.  But laughs soon fade, as Sonia declares that she is certainly not a whore but rather a married woman with one husband, among other disturbing thoughts – all references we can only predict have surfaced from real-life trauma.   While she was able to successfully raise two children, Howard and his sister recall their mother’s unusual habits of keeping a meat axe beneath her pillow and staring out the window at odd hours of the night from her perch on the living room floor.  To this day she refuses to sleep in her nursing home bed, preferring to sleep upright in her chair instead, always ready to run.

Through a circuit of newly found relatives, Howard is able to gather that his mother, at age 11, fled the Nazis in her hometown, now Dubno, Ukraine, surviving on her own for many years before her area was liberated.  He meets with Sonia’s childhood friend, Leon, who appears in an old photograph with a young Sonia.  Like her, Leon was a Jewish adolescent on the run, but he has dealt with his troubling past more stably.  As Howard tags along on Leon’s trip back to Dubno, the survivor’s strength and charisma is astounding – a fascinating display of human character that nearly steals the show.

Unlike Leon who boldly braves his past, Sonia is diagnosed with late-onset Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. For her family, this confirms the sad understanding that she is, in fact, reliving vile, buried memories from a life she’s tried so hard to forget.

Sprouting from interested response to Reich’s 2003 Tribute article, “Hunted 60 years ago, Sonia is running again”, as well as his 2006 memoir The First and Final Nightmare of Sonia Reich, this film version of Prisoner of Her Past is captivating, even hilarious at times, yet equally rich with authentic emotion and heartrending devastation that we can only see to believe.  Most memorable are the scenes in which Sonia is presented with painful reminders of her former life – a photograph of her as a child, Howard’s book about her life, or a visit from Leon himself – all of which she firmly denies or pushes away.

As the film concludes, Sonia’s struggle does not.  The atrocity and hardship surrounding this woman’s life and her current condition has stayed with me for nearly a week, and it does not seem to be going away. Kartemquin Films, known for its socially relevant documentaries, feeds us an essential glimpse into a life that too many victims lead and inspires us to recognize, remember, and hopefully prevent for the future.

To watch the trailer, view scheduled screenings, order the DVD, and find out more about Sonia’s tale, visit Kartemquin’s website.