Students Videotape Family Interviews

When it comes to interviewing his grandparents, 10-year-old Tyler Palacios, a fifth-grader at Valley Beth Shalom Day School, is a Mike Wallace in the making.

“Probing, very probing,” Tyler’s grandfather Ronald Barrett said after he and his wife, Kathy, completed a 90-minute interview this week detailing their lives. The Barretts traveled from their home in New Orleans to participate.

Tyler was one of 35 fifth-graders at the Encino day school who interviewed their grandparents or parents for an intergenerational video under the supervision of TV producer Al Rabin, whose credits include the soap operas “Days of Our Lives” and “General Hospital.”

“It’s perfect when a grandchild interviews a grandparent because the grandparent is much more revealing to a grandchild, because of that very close relationship, than they would [be] to a professional interviewer,” said Rabin, who has overseen the project for three years.

Some of the interviews in past years have dealt with accounts of the Holocaust, said Rabin, who cited an example of a couple separated in a Nazi concentration camp only to be reunited years later when both believed the other was dead.

“They tell these unbelievable stories that even their children don’t know and certainly after they’re gone, nobody would know if it weren’t for these videos,” Rabin said. “We’re creating video histories of families.

“Twenty or 30 years down the road, the children of these children can see the grandparents or great-grandparents that maybe they’ve never met.”