Three minutes in Poland
Subtitle: discovering a lost world in a 1938 family film
By: Glenn Kurtz
Edition: First edition.
Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Published: 2014
Language: eng
Number of pages: 415
ISBN-13: 9780374276775
Subjects: Jews; Family; Community life; Travel; Holocaust survivors; Amateur films; Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945); Biography; History
Description: "The author's search for the annihilated Polish community captured in his grandfather's 1938 home movie. Traveling in Europe in August 1938, one year before the outbreak of World War II, David Kurtz, the author's grandfather, captured three minutes of ordinary life in a small, predominantly Jewish town in Poland on 16 mm Kodachrome color film. More than seventy years later, through the brutal twists of history, these few minutes of home-movie footage would become a memorial to an entire community--an entire culture--that was annihilated in the Holocaust. Three Minutes in Poland traces Glenn Kurtz's remarkable four-year journey to identify the people in his grandfather's haunting images. His search takes him across the United States; to Canada, England, Poland, and Israel; to archives, film preservation laboratories, and an abandoned Luftwaffe airfield. Ultimately, Kurtz locates seven living survivors from this lost town, including an eighty-six-year-old man who appears in the film as a thirteen-year-old boy. Painstakingly assembled from interviews, photographs, documents, and artifacts, Three Minutes in Poland tells the rich, funny, harrowing, and surprisingly intertwined stories of these seven survivors and their Polish hometown. Originally a travel souvenir, David Kurtz's home movie became the sole remaining record of a vibrant town on the brink of catastrophe. From this brief film, Glenn Kurtz creates a riveting exploration of memory, loss, and improbable survival--a monument to a lost world"--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references.
Table of contents: title: Part One; title: 1. Artifacts; title: 2. Preservation; title: 3. Inheritance; title: 4. People and Faces; title: 5. A Sea of Ghosts; title: Part Two; title: 6. It's Good to be Back; title: 7. Lists; title: 8. Now We're Onto Something; title: 9. Darkness and Rain; title: 10. Das Vaterland deines Grossvaters; title: 11. A Different Style of Torture; title: Part Three; title: 12. Something Goes From the Picture; title: 13. A Town of Memories; title: 14. Family History; title: 15. The Story of the Film; title: Epilogue; title: Author's Note.