The ship docks in the port of Norfick, Virginia on a Tuesday morning in August 1943. The men on the lower decks can hear the dock before they can see it. Metal on metal, crane chains, American voices calling out in a language that most of them do not speak. They have been at sea for 12 days, crossing from North Africa in the hold of a transport vessel, sleeping in bunks three high, fed twice a day, given access to the deck in rotating groups of 30 for one hour of fresh air per watch cycle. They are

German prisoners of war. Most of them were captured in Tunisia during the final weeks of the North African campaign when the entire Axis position in Africa collapsed at once and nearly 300,000 German and Italian soldiers laid down their weapons in the span of 10 days. These men have been soldiers for 2, three, four years. They know exactly what captivity means. They have been told. The propaganda told them. The Whisper Network in the holding camp in Algeria told them. Their own imaginations working in the dark of the

ship’s hold for 12 days told them. And what all of those sources agreed on was this. America was going to be hard. Hard food, hard guards, hard conditions, hard years. They were the enemy. They would be treated like the enemy. That was the contract of war. The gang plank comes down. The first prisoner steps onto American soil. A United States Army corporal at the bottom of the gangplank hands him a paper cup of coffee and a donut. The prisoner stops moving. He looks at the coffee. He looks at the

donut. He looks at the corporal. The corporal says, “Welcome to America.” And something shifts inside that man that will take months and in some cases years to fully understand. We are going back now to understand who these men were before they stepped off that gangplank. Because what made the unusual treatment so unusual was the specific set of expectations they carried across the Atlantic with them. We are in the summer of 1943 and we are going to follow one man through the entire experience from

the moment of his capture to the moment he understood fully and without reservation what America had actually done to him and why. His name is Conrad. He is 29 years old. He is from the city of Dortmund in the industrial rurer region of northwestern Germany. Before the war, he was a secondary school teacher of mathematics and natural science. He was conscripted in 1940, trained as an infantry soldier, served in France, and then transferred to North Africa, where he spent 2 years in the desert heat of Libya and Tunisia as part

of the Africa Corpse. He was captured near Tunis on May 9th, 1943, 3 days before the official surrender of all Axis forces in North Africa. Conrad spent three weeks in a processing camp near Tunis before being transported to an embarcation point at Iran in Algeria. During those three weeks, he observed everything he could about how the Americans handled German prisoners. And what he observed went into a private mental file labeled not yet meaning. This might be an act, and the real treatment will begin later. The

processing camp at Iran was organized, clean, and adequately fed. The guards were not brutal. The intake process involved documentation, a medical examination, an assignment to a housing area according to rank. This was consistent with Geneva Convention standards, and Conrad knew it. He had read the convention. He was a secondary school teacher before the war. He read things. He filed it under not yet and boarded the ship. On the ship, the 12 days in the hold were uncomfortable but not cruel. The food was adequate. The

water was clean. Prisoners who became seasick were not ignored. A United States Army medic circulated through the hold twice daily, checking on men who were symptomatic and providing medication to those who needed it. Conrad watched this with the sustained attention of a man building a case. His case so far was the Americans are performing decency for the crossing. When they reach America, the performance will stop and the real treatment will begin. He held this theory for 12 days. He was still holding it when the ship

docked in Norphick and the corporal handed him coffee and a donut. He drank the coffee. He ate the donut. He filed it under still not Yet. And then the transport truck drove him through the streets of Virginia toward a camp called Camp Picket. And the case he had been building started showing cracks he was not prepared for. We are now at Camp Picket in Virginia in August 1943. And Conrad is standing at the intake desk on his first morning at the permanent camp. Camp Picket is a full military installation built originally

as an American army training base, now converted to hold German prisoners. It is orderly, paved, permanent, and large. Conrad has been processed through two temporary facilities before arriving here, and those facilities were adequate. Camp Picket is something different. Camp Picket looks like it was built to last. The intake process at Camp Picket begins with documentation, name, rank, service number, unit, date of capture, medical history. This is standard. Conrad answers everything accurately. Then the intake officer, a

lieutenant named Greavves, who speaks competent German with an American accent, begins asking questions that are not standard. He asks, “What was your occupation before military service?” Conrad says, “Secondary school teacher.” Greavves writes this down. He asks, “What subjects did you teach?” Conrad says, “Mathematics and natural science.” Greavves writes this down. He asks, “Do you have any other vocational or professional skills beyond teaching?”

Conrad says, “I have some competency in technical drawing from my science training.” Greavves writes this down. He asks, “Are you fluent in any languages beyond German?” Conrad says, “I have functional English and some French.” Greavves writes all of this down in a way that is not prefuncter but focused. The way someone writes when the information actually matters to them. Conrad looks at Greavves and says in English, “Why are you asking these questions?” Greavves looks up. He says,

“Because we want to know who you are.” Conrad says, “Why?” Grieves says, “Because you are going to be here for a while and what happens during that time should not be wasted.” Conrad stands at the intake desk and holds that sentence for a moment. What happens during that time should not be wasted. He has no frame for this sentence in the context of prisoner of war camp intake. He files it. He picks up his kit which contains soap, a toothbrush, toothpaste, a razor, shaving soap, a comb, and a small

mirror. And he walks to barracks 12 where he has been assigned a bunk. He sits on the bunk. He looks at the hygiene kit. He takes out the mirror and looks at his own face, which he has not seen in a good mirror in several weeks. He looks like himself, but thinner and more weathered, and with the specific expression of a man who has just encountered a question he does not yet have an answer to. We are still at Camp Picket, and it is Conrad’s third day at the camp. He is walking between the barracks and the mess hall in the

morning when he passes a building he has not entered yet. Through the open windows of the building, he can hear something. It takes him a few seconds to identify the sound because he is not expecting it. It is a piano. Someone is playing a piano inside that building, not scales or exercises. An actual piece of music, something Conrad recognizes after a moment as a Schubert impromptu played with genuine competence by someone who has been practicing seriously for years. He stops walking. He stands outside the window and listens

for 45 seconds. Then he continues to the mess hall. At breakfast, he asks the prisoner sitting across from him, an older man named Walter, who arrived at camp Picket 3 weeks before Conrad, and who has the specific calm of someone who has already processed his initial shock. What is that building? The one with the piano. Walter says that is the recreation and education building. Conrad says, “What is the piano for?” Walter says, “For playing.” They have a piano in there, an upright piano, and

whoever wants to play it can sign up for a 1-hour slot. There are also tables for drawing, a shelf of art supplies, a shelf of books in German, and twice a week a class. Conrad puts down his fork. He says, “A class in what?” Walter says, “Depends on the week.” Last week it was English language. The week before that, it was a lecture on American geography given by one of the prisoners who was a geography teacher before the war. Conrad says, “Who runs these classes?” Walter

says, “The prisoners run them. The Americans provide the space and the materials.” The Americans are also building a theater stage at the far end of the building. Conrad says, “A theater stage.” Walter says for productions. The prisoners who are interested in theater are apparently going to put on plays. Conrad picks his fork back up. He looks at his food. He says very quietly, “What is this place?” We are now going to step back from Conrad’s individual experience

and look at the formal structure behind the unusual treatment he was encountering. Because the piano and the art supplies and the geography lectures were not improvised kindness. They were a deliberate program designed at the highest levels of the American prisoner of war administration with specific goals and specific methods. We are still at Camp Picket in the summer of 1943 and we are going to trace how this program came to exist and what it was actually trying to do. The United States War Department established the prisoner

of war special projects division in 1943, specifically to manage what happened to the minds of German prisoners during their time in American custody. The program was built on a single premise. Germany would lose this war. When Germany lost, it would need to be rebuilt as a functioning democratic society. The men currently in American prisoner of war camps would eventually return to Germany. Some of them would become teachers, administrators, local officials, community leaders. If those men returned home with their national

socialist beliefs intact, they would rebuild the same system that caused the war. If those men returned home with a different understanding of democracy, free institutions, and civic life, they might help build something different. The prison camp was therefore not just a holding facility. It was in the thinking of the special projects division a 2-year window of opportunity that would never come again. The program was called the intellectual diversion program in early internal documents and was later

referred to simply as the re-education effort. It operated through several specific channels. The camp library stocked German language books chosen to broaden intellectual horizons rather than to propagandize. Novels, history, science texts, philosophy, and literature that had been banned in Germany under the national socialist regime. The camp newspaper, Dare Ruff, meaning the call, was written by prisoners under American oversight and covered real news alongside commentary, designed to introduce democratic

concepts without appearing to lecture. Education classes were organized and taught primarily by prisoners themselves, with American administrators providing space, materials, and occasional outside speakers. Art, music, theater, and craft programs were provided not as entertainment alone, but as deliberate tools for creating intellectual and creative engagement that kept minds active and open. We are back with Conrad at Camp Picket, one week into his arrival, and he has found the library. The library at Camp Picket

occupies three shelves in the recreation and education building and a dedicated small reading room with four chairs and a window that looks toward the athletic field. The shelves hold approximately 300 German language volumes. When Conrad first visits, he stands in front of the shelves and reads the spines. He reads the spines again. He reads them a third time because what he is seeing does not fit the model he brought with him from Germany. He is reading spines of books that do not exist in Germany anymore.

Books that were burned in 1933. Books whose authors were banned, exiled, or killed. Books that Conrad, as a secondary school teacher, had removed from his classroom shelves when the new curriculum guidelines arrived. He had put those books in a box in his apartment and kept the box under his bed for 2 years before his conscription. Unable to throw them away, but unable to display them either, he pulls out a novel by Eric Maria Remark, whose books were among the first burned in Germany in 1933. He holds it. He looks at the cover. He

opens to the first page and reads the first paragraph standing in front of the shelf, forgetting that he is in a prisoner of war camp library in Virginia. He finishes the first page. He takes the book to one of the four chairs in the reading room. He sits down. He reads for 3 hours. He misses the midday meal. A prisoner named Anton from his barracks comes to find him at 1:00 in the afternoon and tells him the kitchen has already closed. Conrad says, “I know. Sorry. I will be there at dinner.”

Anton looks at the book in Conrad’s hands and says, “Where did you find that?” Conrad says, “The shelf. There are more.” Anton says, “What else is there?” Conrad says, “Come and look.” That evening, Anton three other prisoners from barracks 12 are in the reading room. By the end of the week, the four chairs are in use from the time the building opens until it closes. Conrad speaks to the camp education officer, a lieutenant named Shaw, about expanding the library holdings. Shaw

provides him a request form and tells him to list specific titles. Conrad fills out one form. Then he asks for a second form, then a third. He submits 37 title requests in his first month. 22 are approved and ordered. When they arrive 6 weeks later, Conrad carries the box of new books to the reading room shelf and lines them up. He is doing the work of a librarian. He is in a prisoner of war camp. He has a bunk in barracks 12 and a work assignment and a camp script allowance. And he is building a

library the way you build a library, one book at a time, because the reading room has four chairs and they are never empty. Let us know in the comments where you are watching this from. Are you in the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, or somewhere else? If you want to dive even deeper into these untold stories, consider becoming a channel member. You’ll get your name mentioned in the video, early access to videos, exclusive content, and direct input on which stories we cover next. Join our

inner circle of history keepers. We are going to stop here and look at the scale of what was happening across the entire American prisoner of war system because Conrad’s piano and remark and four library chairs were not a local experiment at Camp Picket. They were happening at hundreds of facilities simultaneously and the numbers behind that effort are remarkable. We are still in 1943 and 1944 and we need to understand the scope. The American prisoner of war system at its peak held approximately 425,000

German prisoners across more than 500 facilities in 45 states. The special projects division operated its education and re-education program across the majority of these facilities. By 1944, the program had distributed more than 100,000 German language books to camp libraries nationwide. not propaganda materials, but genuine literature, history, and science selected by a panel that included German immigrant scholars living in the United States. More than 30 different German language newspapers and camp magazines were being produced

by prisoner populations at various facilities under American oversight, but with prisoner editorial direction. Theater groups had been established at dozens of camps, producing everything from classical German drama to original plays written by prisoners during their captivity. Music programs were operating at hundreds of facilities. Art classes were producing paintings, drawings, and sculptures that were occasionally exhibited publicly. The vocational education component was equally significant. Prisoners who had

professional backgrounds were identified through the intake process. The same questions that Greavves asked Conrad and placed in roles that used those skills. Teachers taught. Mechanics repaired equipment. Cooks cooked. Carpenters built camp furniture. Medical professionals assisted in the camp clinics. This was not exploitation. Under the Geneva Convention, prisoners were paid for labor and the Americans paid the standard rate. The effect of the vocational placement was that prisoners spent their captivity doing

work they knew how to do. Work that maintained their skills and their sense of competence rather than being assigned random manual labor that destroyed the professional identity they would need when they returned home. This was unusual. It was deliberately unusual. and the men receiving it were in the majority aware that it was deliberate which created its own complicated layer of reaction. If you are enjoying this story and want more untold accounts from World War II prisoners of war, make sure

to subscribe to the channel. We are bringing you stories that most history books never covered. We are now 6 weeks into Conrad’s time at Camp Picket and the theater stage in the recreation and education building has been completed. It is a low platform roughly 4 m wide and 3 m deep. At the far end of the building, there are curtains, actual stage curtains in a dark red fabric that were donated by a theater company from a nearby Virginia town after a request from the camp administration. There are

wooden benches arranged in a semicircle facing the stage. There are foot lights made from stripped down electric lamps mounted along the stage edge by the camp maintenance crew and a prisoner electrician from Berlin named Manfred who has been at Camp Picket since May and who ran the wiring for the footlights in an afternoon and then stood back and turned them on and looked at them with the particular satisfaction of a man who spent six months in the North African desert and is now doing something that uses his actual training.

The first production at Camp Pickets Theater is a reading of scenes from a Schiller play organized by a prisoner named Helmut who was an amateur theater director in Munich before the war. Helm approaches the project with the earnest intensity of someone who has been waiting his entire captivity for exactly this opportunity. He holds auditions. He assigns roles. He runs rehearsals every evening for three weeks. Conrad is recruited to play a supporting role, not because he has theater experience, but

because Helm, watching him read aloud from one of the library books one afternoon, decides he has a good voice and the specific quality of a person who can hold an audience’s attention without performing at them. Conrad rehearses his three scenes six times over three weeks. On the evening of the performance, every seat on the wooden benches is occupied and some prisoners sit on the floor. American guards and camp staff attend, standing at the back. Lieutenant Shaw is there. Conrad stands on the stage behind

the dark red curtains before they open. He can hear the audience settling. He looks at the footlights through the gap in the curtains. He thinks, “I am a prisoner of war about to perform Schiller on a stage in Virginia. He has no category for this. The curtains open. The performance runs for 1 hour and 40 minutes. It is not polished. Some of the actors forget lines and prompt each other quietly in German with the specific practicality of people who are more invested in completing the scene

than in preserving illusion. The audience is very quiet throughout. Not the quiet of boredom, but the specific silence of a group of people experiencing something that is filling a space inside them they did not know was empty. At the end of the performance, there is applause. Extended applause. The kind of applause that comes from men who have been sleeping in barracks and eating in mess halls and working in farm fields and who have spent the evening in a story fully inside a story for the first time in years. Helmet takes a bow.

Conrad takes a bow. He stands on that stage in the footlights and hears the applause and thinks about Dortmund and the classroom and the box of band books under his bed. He files none of this. Some things cannot be filed. We need to stop here and say something that this story requires. Not everyone experienced the unusual treatment the way Conrad did. Not every prisoner who found a piano or a library or a theater stage responded with wonder or gradual opening. Some of them were furious about it. We are still at Camp Picket and at

other camps across the United States in 1943 and 1944. And we need to spend time with the anger because the anger was real and it tells us something important about what the unusual treatment was actually doing. The prisoners who arrived with firm national socialist convictions, and there were many of them, experienced the education program not as an opportunity, but as an assault. The library with the ban books was not a gift to them. It was evidence that America considered German cultural policy illegitimate and was

actively working to undermine it. The theater with Schiller was not culture. It was a soft indoctrination effort designed to make prisoners comfortable in an enemy environment and gradually receptive to enemy values. The re-education newspaper Dare Ruff was not journalism. It was propaganda in German clothing. These men were not wrong to identify what the program was trying to do. They were right. The program was absolutely trying to change minds. The disagreement was about whether those minds needed changing. In several camps,

the ideological prisoners organized active resistance to the re-education effort. They pressured other prisoners to avoid the library and the education classes. They created social penalties for prisoners who participated visibly in the American facilitated cultural programs. At some camps, prisoners who were seen reading Dare Ruff or attending English classes were harassed, ostracized, or physically threatened. At a small number of camps, this internal camp terrorism was severe enough that prisoners were genuinely afraid to

engage with the education program. The American administrators responded by eventually identifying the most aggressively ideological prisoners and separating them into dedicated facilities where they could not dominate the general population. But this separation was never total and the social pressure inside the wire was a constant feature of life that shaped how every prisoner navigated the unusual treatment they were receiving. Conrad felt this pressure. Three weeks into his time at Camp Picket, a prisoner from a

different barracks named Dieter, who was known in the compound as someone with strong ideological commitments, stopped him outside the library and said, “I know what you spend your afternoons doing in there.” Conrad said, “Reading.” Dier said, “Reading banned books provided by Americans who want to make you into something you are not.” Conrad looked at Dieter for a moment. He said, “The books are good. Dier said, “That is exactly what they want you to think.”

Conrad said, “Shiller wrote one of those books.” Schiller is banned in America. Dier had no answer for this. He walked away. Conrad went into the library. But he thought about the conversation for three days afterward, not because Dieter was right, but because the fact that someone was watching what he read in a prisoner of war camp in Virginia felt familiar in a way he did not want to examine too closely. We are now at Camp Picket, 3 months into Conrad’s captivity, and the not yet theory he

built on the ship from North Africa is collapsing under the weight of evidence. We are in November 1943. The mornings are cold now, and the Virginia autumn has turned the trees outside the camp perimeter into colors that Conrad watches through the barracks window with the specific attention of a man from the roar industrial region who grew up surrounded by factory smoke and who finds autumn trees, even through a wire fence unexpectedly moving. The collapse of the theory comes not through a single

dramatic event, but through the accumulated pressure of specific ordinary things that have no place in the model of enemy cruelty that Conrad carried across the Atlantic. He makes a list in a small notebook he has been keeping since his second week at the camp. The list is titled Things That Do Not Fit. It runs to 22 items by November. Number one is the donut on the Norfick dock which started it. Number four is the remark novel on the library shelf. Number seven is the footlights on the theater stage. Number 11 is the fact

that the camp physician, a captain named Dr. Howard, asked Conrad during his three-month health check whether he was sleeping adequately. And when Conrad said no, spent 12 minutes asking him questions about what was keeping him awake and then gave him a pamphlet in German about sleep hygiene and told him he could come back in 2 weeks if it did not improve. Number 14 is the paycheck. Conrad is assigned to a work detail at a local Virginia farm 3 days per week and is paid in camp script at the standard

rate of 80 cents per day for his labor. He uses the script at the canteen to buy writing materials and occasionally extra food. The 80 cents per day is not a large amount, but it is the first wage Conrad has earned in 3 years. In the German army, he received a military stipend. This is different. This is a wage for work done, paid on a predictable schedule, available to spend at his own discretion. It is a small thing. It is item number 14 on the list. Number 22, the last item on the list when he writes it in November, is the

question that Greavves asked him at intake. What was your occupation before military service? Conrad has thought about this question repeatedly since his first day at the camp. He has thought about why it was asked and what happened to the answer. The answer was recorded. His teaching background was used to place him as an assistant in the camp education program, helping other prisoners in the English language class twice a week and available to tutor individuals in mathematics when requested. He is teaching again. He is

in a prisoner of war camp in Virginia and he is teaching mathematics to German prisoners who want to understand it in a room with good light and adequate chalk. and the men in his tutorial sessions show up voluntarily because they want to learn and not because they are required to. He looks at number 22 on his list. He writes underneath it, “I think the not yet theory is wrong. I think this is what it actually is. We are now in the spring of 1944, 8 months into Conrad’s captivity at Camp

Picket. We are at the farm work detail three days a week and we are going to follow what happens there because the farm is where the unusual treatment takes its most human and least institutional form. The farm is operated by a family named Hartwell approximately 12 kilometers from the camp. The Hartwells have been receiving prisoner labor details since October 1943. The operation is straightforward. A bus takes the prisoner work detail to the farm at 8:00 in the morning and returns them at 5 in the afternoon. A camp guard

accompanies the detail and is present throughout the workday. The prisoners work in the fields under the direction of the farm’s foreman. The Hartwell Farm is primarily a tobacco and vegetable operation. In spring, the work is planting and soil preparation. Conrad works in the vegetable fields because his allocation to that section was made on his first day and has [clears throat] remained consistent. The foreman is a man in his 50s named Earl, who communicates with the prisoners through a combination of simple English, hand

gestures, and the confident direction of someone who has been farming this land for 30 years and knows exactly what needs to be done in what sequence, regardless of who is doing it. Conrad’s English is improving steadily through the camp language classes and the library reading. And by spring, he can understand most of what Earl says on the first delivery and ask basic clarifying questions. The unusual thing at the Hartwell Farm is the farmer’s wife. Her name is Dorothy Hartwell. She is in her

late 40s and she brings lunch to the field in a basket every day at 12:30. sandwiches, fruit, and sometimes a piece of pie. She is not required to provide lunch. The prisoners are supposed to bring their own rations from the camp for the workday. Dorothy Hartwell brings lunch anyway because, as she explains to the guard on the first day, she was raised not to watch people work through a meal break and go without. The guard lets it pass. The prisoners eat Dorothy Hartwell’s sandwiches. They are good

sandwiches. But what Conrad remembers and writes about in his notebook is not the sandwiches. It is the fact that on the third week, Dorothy Hartwell sits down on the wooden crate she uses as a field seat, looks at Conrad, who is eating his sandwich nearby, and says in careful English, “Where are you from in Germany?” And she actually wants to know. She is not performing the question. She has no agenda behind it. She is a farmer’s wife in Virginia who has German prisoners working her fields

and wants to know who they are because that is the kind of person she is. Conrad says, Dortmund, she says, I don’t know it. What is it like? He tries to explain Dortund to Dorothy Hartwell of Virginia. It takes several lunches over several weeks. By the time he has finished explaining Dortmund, he has also explained his parents, his classroom, the box of books under his bed, and the day he was conscripted. Dorothy listens to all of it with the quiet attention of someone who is filing it not as intelligence, but as a human

story she considers worth hearing. When he finishes, she says, “You must miss your students.” He says, “Yes.” She says, “They probably miss you, too.” What does Conrad’s story tell us about what unusual treatment actually means in the context of war and captivity? The treatment he received at Camp Picket was unusual because it departed from the expected logic of war, which is that the captured enemy is secured, contained, and held until the conflict ends. The expected logic does not include

libraries of band books, theater stages with red curtains, mathematics tutoring sessions, and a farmer’s wife in Virginia who wants to know about Dortund. The expected logic does not give the enemy a teaching certificate to bring home. These departures from the expected logic were not accidents. They were choices made by specific people in the United States War Department who looked at 425,000 German prisoners and saw not just a security problem, but a historical opportunity. Germany was going to need

to be rebuilt. These were the builders. The question that hangs over this story and over every story about the American prisoner of war program is, did it work? The honest answer is partial and complicated. Some of the prisoners who experienced the re-education program came home and contributed to the rebuilding of West Germany as a democratic society. Some came home unchanged and carried their original beliefs into the post-war years. Some, like Conrad, came home genuinely altered, not because they were

brainwashed, but because they were given the conditions to think. And thinking given time and adequate materials and the presence of other thinking people has a way of producing results that raw propaganda cannot. The program did not change Germany by itself. The war did that. The occupation did that. The Marshall Plan did that. But the 2-year window in the prisoner of war camps, the books and the stages and the certificates and the conversations that nobody told them to have contributed something to the Germany that emerged

from the ruins. Not everything, not even most things, but something. Conrad returns to Dortmund in December 1945. The city is damaged, but not destroyed. His parents are alive. His school building is standing, though missing its roof on the east wing, where a bomb fell in 1944. He reports to the city education office in January 1946 and presents his qualifications, his pre-war teacher certificate, his camp education competency certifications, and his notebook, which he offers not as a credential, but because the man behind

the desk in the education office asks, “What did you do during the war?” Conrad says, “I fought in North Africa. Then I was a prisoner in Virginia for 2 and a half years.” The man says, “What did you do in Virginia?” Conrad says, “I built a library.” The man looks at him. He says, “Can you build a curriculum?” Conrad says, “Give me a room, some chalk, and a list of what the students need to know.” The man gives him a class assignment starting in February. Conrad walks out

of the education office into the Dortmund winter air. He puts his hands in his coat pockets. He walks toward where his school is, or what remains of it. He is going to see what the roof situation looks like and whether the east-wing classrooms are salvageable before the spring term begins. He has a teaching certificate from a prisoner of war camp in Virginia. He has three notebooks. He has work to