Three Minutes: A Lengthening (2021) - full transcript

These three minutes of life were taken out
of the flow of time by David Kurtz in 1938.

His grandson Glenn
Kurtz discovered them in 2009

in a closet in Palm
Beach Garden, Florida.

My grandfather was born in Poland in 1888.

So my grandfather was only four years old
when he came to the United States.

He grew up feeling himself
to be American.

By the mid nineteen thirties he and
my grandmother had a family...

and they were living in Brooklyn
and they began to travel a little bit.

The trip that they took to Europe
I call it the 'grand tour'.

I think that like prosperous
Americans the thing to do...

when you achieved a certain
socio-economic level,



was you went to Europe and so on this
trip my grandparents were in Paris,

they were in Amsterdam,
they were in Zurich and Geneva,

they went to the south of France,
they were in London.

And the trip to Poland was
an extraordinary detour.

In Warsaw, David Kurtz rented a car.

Where did he go?
What do we see?

It is possible to locate a place
solely from looking?

If you don't see the Eiffel tower,
how do you know you are in Paris?

They say 'one picture is worth a thousand
words', but for that phrase to make sense,

you do need to know what it
is you are looking at.

David Kurtz rented a black sedan.
Where did he get out?

When I discovered the film I didn't
know at all where it was taken...

and I asked my father and my aunt

and they both said that they thought it was
my grandmother's hometown, called Berezne.



It was on the Polish-Ukrainian border.

It was a town of about
three thousand Jews.

And in august of 1942 the entire
Jewish population was murdered.

It took me about six months to find a
survivor and eventually I did find a man...

who lived in Florida
and within a second of

looking at this film he
said: "It's not my town".

Like any recording device,

film by itself preserves detail without
necessarily conveying knowledge.

Solely from these images we
cannot determine the place,

but we can establish the time of day.
This must have happened before this.

The shadow under the balconies
cuts at perhaps a fifty degree angle.

It is around eleven in the morning.

The Meteorological Institute in Warsaw
recorded at 11 AM on that day:

temperature 24.1 degrees Celsius, light
north-east wind, with slight cloud cover.

I assumed if it wasn't my
grandmother's hometown

it was almost certainly my
grandfather's hometown.

I was able to find a photograph
of one of the buildings,

in fact of the synagogue in the town and
it showed the doors of this synagogue...

and actually there is a
carved panel on the upper

left panel of one of
the doors there is a lion,

the lion of Judah and
its very distinctive...

and on this photograph
which was clearly

marked as being of the
Nasielsk synagogue...

there's that lion so it was from
this that I was able to confirm...

that the town in the film is Nasielsk.

It is Thursday, the Fourth of August 1938.

A black Sedan drives
five Americans to the small

town of Nasielsk, 30
miles north of Warsaw.

The town had 7000 inhabitants in 1938,
of whom 3000 were Jewish.

Fewer than 100 of them
survived the Holocaust.

Nasielsk was not an important town
unless you lived there. It was just a town.

But of all the Polish towns destroyed
in the Holocaust,

Nasielsk is among the very few
that exist in moving pictures,

among just a handful preserved in colour.

Nothing I learned
about the people in my

grandfather's film could
prevent their death...

or bring them back to life.

No film, no memorial
and no recollection could

restore, retrieve, recover
or revive this world.

All I could do.
All anyone could do

was to piece together the few fragments of
their lives that remained,

to show their edges and absences,

defining the loss of
that world

by detailing the little of it
that had been preserved.

In this way, we might succeed in
keeping the memory of the dead alive,

of remembering them,
despite the fact that they are dead.

The film by David Kurtz
was found and restored

just before it would
have been lost forever,

due to damage and decay.

The material had
shrunk, curled in on itself,

and eventually fused
into a single mass.

If it had been found
a month later, it would

have been impossible
to restore at all.

Just in time the Holocaust Museum
in Washington send it to a Colour Lab,

where they set about saving
what they could.

Among other issues, the celluloid
suffered from vinegar syndrome,

from shrinking, crazing, edge weave,
cupping and buckling.

Sklep spożywczy (Grocery store)

My first purpose in researching the film
was to try to identify the people.

But without enough information it
is impossible to identify the people.

If you don't know who
they are or if you don't

have someone who can
tell you who they are...

there is almost no way to
find out their name.

So I had to look in the frame at all
the other information that was visible...

and all that information I thought might
possibly lead to an identification.

And one of the signs that
immediately caught my attention...

its over the doorway of what
appears to be some kind of shop.

And there's a woman who steps out of
that doorway and looks down the street.

And I thought if I could
learn what that sign

says perhaps I could
identify this woman.

Sklep spożywczy (Grocery store)

When I looked at the second line
and played with the letters...

and spoke with a polish speaker...

I was able to come up with at least
the first number of letters...

which hinted at what it probably meant,
and the words means grocery.

Spożywczy (Grocery))

While the third line
almost certainly gives the name

of the person whose
grocery store it was.

But the third line is the hardest to read.

And I captured that frame; I
altered the saturation and the contrast.

I did everything I could do.

Ultimately I send the film back
to the laboratory...

and they looked at the original frames
under a microscope.

And their conclusion was that
the letters cannot be made out.

In all languages, after black and white,
red was the first colour to be named.

In some languages the word for red
is still the same as the word for blood.

Here we see a red flower, a red dress,
a red bow, a red headscarf, a red belt,

a red sweater, a red hat,
a red cheek, a red lip.

All colours fade,
but the colour red fades the slowest.

The colours we see here
are the result of a complicated

chemical process involving
silver, plastic and cellulose.

The film emulsion is made of gelatin,
the same gelatin you eat,

made of the bones and skin of cattle,
a very nineteenth century recipe.

Around the square in Nasielsk we see trees.
A very generic word, trees.

Christmas trees, palm trees,
beeches, birches, bonsai. All trees.

Here we clearly see a
deciduous tree,

found on many streets but never
given a second thought,

like birds can stay
simply 'birds' for years,

maybe they never even become blackbirds,
or raven, or jackdaws.

The Director of the
Botanical Garden in.

Poznan states that the
trees are linden trees,

'little leaf' linden trees even,
or Tilia cordata...

according to the determination system
invented by botanist Carl Linnaeus,

whose name in his native Swedish, Linn,
also means linden tree.

They are quite common
in the western hemisphere.

These are the trees that gave the Unter
den Linden boulevard in Berlin its name.

David Kurtz sent a postcard from this
very boulevard to his children in Brooklyn,

two days after visiting Nasielsk,
on the sixth of august 1938.

He wrote to them from a café called Linden,
located on Unter den Linden number 44:

'Here we are in Berlin,
enjoying a nice glass of beer'.

There are also things in the film
that have not been named yet.

What is this 'thing' hanging from the wall
for example?

Some sort of tank?
A samovar?

And this 'thing' slung over a blind?
A bicycle tire? A part of a horse harness?

Maybe this one was referred to as a 'recz',
which is Polish for 'thing'.

Or someone asked: get me that 'zakh',
in Yiddish.

What you see is what you know.

Who has spotted the little rectangular
shapes on the doorposts?

A mezuzah is a small
ritual object traditionally

affixed to the doorway
of a Jewish home.

The case contains a piece of parchment
with a prayer written on it in Hebrew.

This fulfils the biblical commandment:

'to write the words of God on the gates
and doorposts of your house'.

A lion of Judah frequently
appeared on the doors

of synagogues before
they were destroyed...

or turned into
warehouses, garages,

observatories, cinemas
or stables, like this one.

The Synagogue of Nasielsk, located
just north east of the market square,

was demolished only after the war.

Fragments of the building
are still found today.

There were originally two lions,
one on each door.

The Polish historian Zdzislaw Suwinski,
Head of the School in Nasielsk,

knows what happened
to the one on the right,

already before the war,
when Polish nationalists

frequently harassed
Jewish citizens.

In 1938, during one of
the riots in Nasielsk, a

riot that involved, among
others, Polish youth,

a door of the synagogue was destroyed.

One of the lions was
ripped off from it and

since then, the door has
only one lion left.

Upon hearing about these
events, even the Minister

of Internal Affairs in
Warsaw spoke about it.

When I found the film I donated it to the
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

They were able to restore it and digitized
it and they put in on their website.

During this time I had begun
searching for survivors...

and I had been unsuccessful in locating...

anyone who could tell me anything
about the people that we are seeing.

Two years after I donated the film
I got an email out of the blue...

from a woman in Detroit and
she told me in this email...

that someone had brought the film to
her attention and she viewed it online...

and as the camera pans across the crowd and
all the children are jumping and waving...

she suddenly saw a face and recognized
her grandfather as a thirteen year old boy.

I saw my grandfather's face! And I heard
my dad on the phone saying to my mum:

There is your father!
I said: It's grandpa!

It's him.

My father's face is so recognizable...

because of the full
cheeks that I think a lot

of us in the family
inherited from my dad.

When my daughter called my father
the first thing he said was:

Now you know I'm not from Mars.

I recognized myself immediately.

But I couldn't remember what
was the occasion.

This was my cap that I wore.

We had to...
this was what we wore the yeshiva boys.

I remember I took my cap off
just to be defiant...

and when I came home I had to put it on.

I remember my grandfather one time
I think he saw me without a hat.

He went berserk, he talked to my mother:
look he has gone without a hat!

I mean that is such a
craziness you know when

I look back but this
is what ther life...

they lived the religion to such a degree,
ah they had such standards.

When we first watched the film together.

Mr Chandler was most excited to
describe the differences between the hats.

At the top of the socioeconomic spectrum
there were these black caps

with a small brim that signified that the
boy was in cheider, the religious school.

Next to him in the film
there is a boy wearing

a cloth what we would
call a newsboy cap...

By his hat wearing he was not in my circle.

And this kid was somebody my parents
would not allow me to associate with.

And the fact that he is
standing next to him in the film...

is a sign of how mixed
up the community became

as a result of my
grandfathers presence...

and the fact of the movie camera having
scrambled the social hierarchy.

Nobody had cameras like that.
It was like a novelty, like a magic moment.

Look he holds like this this
and it goes and makes pictures...

you know nobody ever was familiar with it.
It was a great novelty.

A man goes around with this
and how does he take pictures.

My grandfather was an amateur filmmaker,
a very amateur filmmaker.

I learned from my aunt that he had only
purchased the camera in June of 1938,

the month before they set off on this trip.

The camera was a Magazine Ciné-Kodak
that could be loaded alternately with

a black and white or with a
Kodachrome full colour magazine.

My grandfather had probably never
used it before he went on this trip.

In fact, I am almost certain that these
are the first films that he took with it.

So he didn't know anything
about the camera itself,

in fact in the black and white scenes
I'm almost certain he is trying

to shoot above the heads of the children
in order to show the buildings;

he wants to show:
this is where we are.

But the children get in
the way and so he kind

of gives up and allows
them into the frame.

Perhaps you have noticed,
his walking stick keeps waving.

I tried to imagine what must have happened
because he had his cane in one hand...

he always had a walking stick with him

but the camera needs
two hands to operate and so

it keeps going back and
forth, back and forth...

in front of the lens as he is trying
to move the camera around.

All the kids around were Jewish.

This kid I know.
His name was Talmud.

I think I identify him as...
- Chaim Talmud.

What do you remember about him?
- He was a kid I went to cheider with.

Nothing special.

Yes. Him I remember very well.

And there is the woman
from the shul again.

This one? And would she be the mother
of the girl with the brown braids?

This girl appears
frequently in the film, moving

with my grandfather's
lens to remain on camera,

and popping up in almost
every scene of the colour section.

But her face was not familiar to
Morry.

I wondered, because of his
strict religious upbringing,

whether Morry would recognize
any of the girls in the film.

'No, that would be beyond
my scope', he'd said,

'looking at girls'.
Another thing not allowed.

The dresses of the women and girls
are the most colourful things on show.

According to costume historians
the fabrics were quite common at the time.

You could have bought the same patterns
in Prague or Amsterdam.

German fashion from Zichenau.

Zichenau, October 30.

From Polish work to German quality

in between lies a distance
that is not easy to bridge.

But the German
Reconstruction has among

many other things also
managed this miracle.

In October 1941, three years
after these images were filmed,

Nasielsk is mentioned in an article
in the German press.

'But even when one is aware of the miracle
of the German rebuilding of the East,

one is still amazed that in the
region Zichenau, of all places,

products of the highest quality are made.

But the valuable buttons that serve as
jewellery on expensive dresses...

indeed come for a considerable part from
the small East Prussian town Nasielsk.

The Nashelsker button factory
already existed in Polish times.

But then it was a workshop filled
with dust that mocked...

even the most primitive
standards of hygiene.

And what was made there
was the cheapest trash.

Now the buttons that are produced here
go to the big firms in the empire,

and when the eyes of women admiringly
look up at the new creations,

nobody will guess that
the buttons, so masterfully

crafted, come from
a factory in the East,

that two years ago still was
such a real Polish pigsty...

that nobody would have
predicted a future for it.'

The Filar Factory was
one of the most renowned

button factories in
Poland. Very modern.

They also made a new type of plastic.
They made pieces for radios. I can

guarantee that in the movie some people
are wearing buttons from the factory.

I found a case with samples
that they used on worker’s clothes.

I remember we used to walk by,

we heard the presses
tchu tjoem tjoem all day.

We were afraid we
looked into the windows we

saw machines that they
made special buttons.

I think it was from mother
of pearl and bakelite.

The Germans took over the button factory
from the Jewish owners in September 1939.

It did not reopen after the war.

We used to play,
but what did we play with,

with little rocks you know something like.

Every year they
had something they

collected so they
come in different sizes...

little ones big ones, so we used to collect
and we would trade big ones little ones.

And then came a
year we were collecting buttons.

So buttons. They were galore.

All the women have buttons
and every man has buttons...

and than one day we were in the stibl,
on a winter day.

Everybody wore heavy
coats with a dozen buttons this big.

So I said to Leslie,
I said Leslie...

there is a goldmine here of buttons
they are all hanging on the wall...

and he says what do you mean?
Cut them off!

I said we will be the richest, the kids
are gonna envy us with all these buttons.

So he said ok. And
while they were all

praying we were
standing against the wall...

with a razor blade and we're cutting
buttons.

At the end of the service everybody is
wishing good sjabbes and this and that...

and they start putting on the coats and
they are going up and down, up and down...

on a winter day oh my god I remember
my grandfather knew right away:

there he is and we have
the big Shabbat meal...

take him and he can't sit at this
table look what he did...

look as if I had killed somebody and so on.
I mean these are memories that I have.

What was in my mind at that time?

There was you know the stuff
that came later didn't exist then.

I had no fear about it. I felt very
comfortable in this society, in the group.

Everything was routine.

We had my parents, my brothers
and my uncles...

everybody was there it was
a very comfortable existence.

And I said to myself if somebody had
told me what a couple of years later...

I was gonna have to do,
I wouldn't believe it probably.

And that smile I don't know what
I must have been happy or something.

In the Ringelblum Archives in Warsaw,
a document has been preserved...

that describes what happened
on this square in December 1939.

'On december 3, 1939,
at 7.30 in the morning the

sound of a bell rang
out through the village.

The town official announced that all
Jewish men, Jewish women and children...

must gather in the town square within
15 minutes.

No-one knew what was happening.

It could be sensed that something
menacing hung in the air.

At the same time words spread
that the Volksdeutsche...

where barging into Jewish homes, looting
them and devicting their inhabitants.

A terrible chaos arose.

Frightened Jews began gathering
in the square.

Some brought with them small satchels,
carrying them on hunched backs...

and others brought
their own karts on which

they had placed a
portion of their belongings.

In addition to the Jews,
they were in the square.

Each of them held in his hand
a braided whip, a horse whip...

a cat o' nine tails or a steel bar.

The sight in still terror.
Right away they got to work.

They chopped of beards, cut out
sections of hair in order to disfigure...

then they photographed their victims.

In the meantime others were
searching Jewish homes...

to see if by any change anyone
had stayed in the town.

The fun in the square
lasted about two hours.

Then the Jews were arranged in rows. All
those sitting on karts had to get off them.

The first four rows were
ordered to march away...

and the few thousand Jews marched
in the direction of the station...

four kilometers from the city.

The remaining few thousand were led
through the city to the synagogue.

It was already 11 in the morning.

It was announced that
the Jews were going

have to sit here until
6 am of the next day.

There was one huge room.

Crowded the Jews sat on the floor,
one on top of another.

A guard stood near the door.

Once in a while they would come here
to look, but they didn't beat.

When one of the Jews had to leave
to relief himself, he had to report it.

When he left, the guard would
beat him with a leather whip.

And the same happened
when he returned.

They sat like this
until the end of the day.

All night, without
food, drink, in the dark.

At dawn someone noticed that in the hallway
of the synagogue stood about 100 whips.

At 6 am it was announced that
it was time to leave the synagogue.

Near the door everyone was whipped
wherever possible.

Across their heads, backs, legs...

In rows they marched towards the station.

The very ill were placed on plank-beds
that four Jews each would carry.

Along the way Polish neighbors stood on
both sides of the road laughing.

There were a few isolated incidents
where Poles crapped up to the Jews...

to give their close
friends bread and money.

The Jews were not lead to the station
along a straight path, but a circuity one.

There was a lot of mud here,
swampy ground, one kilometer.

Along this stretch, for the entire length
of the road, they stood on both sides.

The Jews were ordered
to run, mud, and sing.

Whips held down on the Jews' heads
this entire time.

The patches of mud where so large
that shoes sank into the clay.

But it was necessary to run farther
and farther, because they kept beating.

The screams of the women
and children where horrible.

Blood streamed from heads,
particularly the men's.

Backpacks where disguarded along
the way in order to continue running.

The karts, bearing belongings,
got stuck along the way.

Finally the Jews reached the station.

Here they were arranged into two rows.

Now a new began.
Frisking.

They looked everywhere.

The better looking ones were ordered
to strip down completely...

and the naked women
where particularly examined.

Other's clothes were
torn apart at the seams.

Those who were found to have something
hidden, particularly the men...

had to role naked in the mud.

Those who had been searched where packed
into train cars waiting at the station.

Which were then sealed shut.

There were at least 25 people
in each compartment.

The cars were deprived
of water and light.

The windows had to stay closed
and during the day obscured.

In these conditions
the journey lasted 36 hours.

It went through Ciechanów, Wawal,
Königsberg...

Ostroleka, Navinykai,
from there to the East-station in Warsaw.

The train stopped at some of the stations
for a few minutes...

but no-one from the public
was allowed near it.

From the East-station the Jews
were taken further...

to Minsk-Mazowiecki, Siedlec,
and then to Luków.

Here the train was stopped.

The cars were opened and they came around
asking how many corpses there were.

That day everyone was still alive.

But in the coming days
a few people died each day.

Soon the local Jews came to the station
in their company.

The newcomers were allowed
to be given water.

Then all the Jews were
ordered into the town.

The local people distributed them
among various empty buildings.

And many of them took them
into their homes.

The general attitude was very warm.

They held however they could.

The first division of Jews from Nasielsk
had been transported in an analogous way...

but the endpoint was Miedzyrzec.

This testimony was hidden in the Jewish
ghetto in Warsaw by Emanuel Ringelblum.

He collected reports from eyewitnesses
from all over Poland

to preserve the history of the Holocaust.

He hid the papers in milk cans and tin
boxes and buried them beneath the ghetto.

The deportation of the
Jewish inhabitants of.

Nasielsk is also described
in a German document,

assembled by the German army commander
of Poland, general Johannes Blaskowitz.

He complained about the brutality
of the German troops in Poland.

Harassing the population made
the occupation more difficult.

Shortly before Christmas 1.600 Jews were
supposed to be deported from Nasielsk.

The police locked them in the synagogue
and beat the victims there with dog whips.

Several Jews were
immediately shot next to the synagogue.

As the majority of Jews
was brought to the train station,

they were driven by
whip-blows through a

particularly dirty area
known as the Red Sea.

Twenty four Jews that
later returned in secret

got five loafs of bread
daily as nourishment...

and were locked away in an ice-cold room,

of which the windows were hammered
closed with wooden boards.

The police took their coats from them and
locked them in at 9 degrees below zero.

The shouting and crying
of the freezing Jews,

including women, could
be heard in the streets.

The commander of the troops
that were stationed in Nasielsk...

had to go to the Landrat and Kreisleiter
Gäblich to get the Jews transported.

The matter was conveyed to the Gauleiter.

The square in Nasielsk still exists.

You hear what it sounds like
now, more than 80 years later.

It is not a market square anymore,
like in the 1930's.

The cobblestones have been replaced
by asphalt.

In the middle is a small
park, that culminates

in a statue of pope
John Paul the second,

the Polish bishop that became
head of the Catholic Church in 1978.

Linden trees still line
the square, although they

seem too small to have
been there in the 30's.

Most houses are still there too.

But of the Jewish
inhabitants of Nasielsk nothing remains:

no statue, no memorial, no sign.

The only thing left is an absence,

a dent in the wood on a doorpost
where once a mezuzah was placed.

The Jews from
Nasielsk were deported in

December 1939 to
ghettos in different towns.

Three years later they were brought from
these ghettos to the death camp Treblinka.

There they were immediately murdered.

Moszek Tuchendler,
Maurice Chandler, managed

to survive the war in
Poland, on false papers.

The other Nasielskers who survived,
like Chandlers school friend Leslie Glodek,

had fled to the part of Poland
that was occupied by the Soviet-Union.

In 1940 most of these refugees
were deported to Siberia.

Of the hundred people
who had been still living in '45,

I found seven still living in,
well, 2012.

Two of them appear in the film;

one is Mr Chandler
and then Faiga Tick.

She is standing with her husband,
or the man who would become her husband.

He also survived the war
but he is no longer living.

Glenn Kurtz and the few survivors
managed to identify...

eleven people of the many
that appear in the film.

Moszek Tuchendler,
now known as Maurice Chandler.

Avrum Kubel.

Simcha Rotstein.

Avrum Kubel.

Simcha Rotstein.

Chaim Talmud.

Boortz.

Chaim Nusen Cwajghaft.

Chaim Nusen Cwajghaft.

Chezkiah.

Szmuel Tick.

Szmuel Tick.

Szmuel Tick.

Faiga Milchberg-Tick.

Faiga Milchberg-Tick.

Czarna Myrla

Miriam Myrla.

Czarna Myrla.

Sklep spożywczy (Grocery store).

Sklep spożywczy (Grocery store)

Polish researcher Kasia Kascprzak
tried to identify the woman...

that steps out of the grocery store.

The big puzzle was the sign in the bottom.
So the family name.

I just took the method of going
letter by letter...

and then seeing what
it could give us probably.

So first thing is that I could see
that there were 8 letters.

Then the first letter
had a belly on the top

so if there is a belly on the top
you have either P or B or R.

Then the second letter
I couldn't really tell.

The third letter was T
and this was for sure.

Then the fourth letter...
I would never guess.

And the fifth letter had the same kind
of shadow like the letter W...

in the spozywczy,
name of the store.

The sixth letter I couldn't figure it out.

Then the seventh letter,
a letter having two arms at the top

so it could be either Y
or K, most probably.

And than the last letter,
the shape of it was a bit like A.

And than I checked the directory book
for Poland from 1929.

I just went through
all of the names of

people who had the
grocery store in Nasielsk.

So than I end up with a lady
called CH Rotowska.

I went on a page with the indexes
of the Jewish vital records...

and than the name not Rotowska

but Ratowska or
Ratowski came out.

The third place to check
was the index of the

businesses in Warsaw
from the Warsaw Archives.

I could see that
Chaja Ratowska had a store,

the grocery store, sklep spozywczy,
in the market square of Nasielsk.

So than we had those three
people who looked like actually one person

and this was confirmed by Mr Chandler
who said that indeed Ratowski

had a grocery store on the other side
of his house on the Rynek in Nasielsk,

which was exactly matching
the emplacement of his

house and the store
which we were looking for.

Nowadays monuments and memorials
predominantly centre around names,

because a name is often
all that is left of a person.

The last proof of his or her existence.
In this case we have faces as traces.

More than 150 people
appear in the film.

However, they probably
do not form a full cross

section of the Jewish
inhabitants of Nasielsk.

The very orthodox hardly appear,
for example,

because they would not have wanted
to be photographed.

We don't know what they said, but there
are words that they must have said,

words that everybody always says,
in English, Polish or Yiddish.

Survivor Leslie Glodek
remembers there was

dancing in this restaurant
on Saturday evenings.

The radio would broadcast the BBC. He
remembers Bert Ambrose and his orchestra.

America.
- America.

My grandparents travelled with three
friends, Mr and Mrs Louis Malina...

and Mr Malina's sister Essie Diamond,
who was Mr Malina's older sister.

Just like David Kurtz, his friend
Louis Malina was born in Nasielsk...

and emigrated to the United States
as a child.

He became a successful businessman
in the textile industry...

and lived in a large apartment
on Central Park West.

In 1938 he sponsored a woman named
Sura Kubel, to come to New York.

He paid for her passage
on the SS Pilsudski.

According to the archive of Ellis Island,
Sura Kubel, 26, corset maker,

arrived in New York in November 1938,

just three months after Louis Malina
visited Nasielsk.

It is probable
that Sura appears in the film.

But she has not been recognized.

Maurice Chandler did recognize her brother,
Avrum Kubel, on the steps of the synagogue.

According to her daughter, Faith,

Sura Kubel never spoke about her siblings,
Avrum and her four sisters.

After Sura died, Faith
found a pack of letters,

send to her mother from
the ghetto in Warsaw.

In one of the letters her siblings write:
'We are waiting for Ezra's brother'.

This Ezra was not a person.

The letters are full of
code words drawn from

Hebrew prayers to evade
the German censors.

'Ezra' means help in Hebrew.

Survivor Andrzej Lubieniecki, an actor,

remembers his girlfriend Maria Wlosko
was trapped in the synagogue in 1939.

When I come to Nasielsk and they told me

the family from my girlfriend

is in the synagogue.

Other Jewish people are in
the synagogue and my girlfriend,

she is in the synagogue.

But in my house where I live,

upstairs,

lives a German officer.

And he is an anti-Hitlerist.

He don’t like when they
arrest Jewish people.

And I

say to the officer:

can you help me

to take from the synagogue

my girlfriend?

He says to me: I
personally can’t make this.

But we don’t have in the town electricity.

I give you my mantle.

His coat?
- Yeah.

Go to the synagogue
and say to the guy what

is there and tell him
that you want to arrest

Maria Wlosko.

I come to the synagogue and a
soldier stand there with a gun you know,

first of all Heil Hitler! Heil Hitler.

I want to arrest a girl
her name is so and so,

she is the head of
the Jewish library

and she has the keys.

And he calls her:

Maria Wlosko, Maria Wlosko.

She comes

and he says an officer
wants to talk to you.

And I take her.

Did she recognize you?

Absolutely not. She didn’t know.

And I went with her to
the house of my sister.

When I come

to my sister’s house I take
off the hat and she says:

Mein Gott! Ik hab dich nicht
derkent (I did not recognize you).

And I say: tomorrow morning

we will run away from here

to the Bug.

The Bug River, yes.
Which was the dividing line...

We go to Bialystok and in
Bialystok was the Russians.

And I bring her to Bialystok.

And in the end we come back to Poland.

This was about

’46

and we didn’t find nobody from the family.

Obviously you see there were a
lot of people. The whole city.

But I don't remember what the occasion
was that they were all in the shul.

It could have been Koussevitzky
coming to sing.

He was in Nasielsk only one time.
Moshe Koussevitzky.

And he was the top-notch cantor in Poland,
he was world-renowned.

But I remember him being in Nasielsk
just before the war.

Aneinu in Hebrew means 'Answer us'.
You know, we prayed to God.

There were a lot of these prayers and you
know I know most of them that he sang.

They were dedicated to God.

So everything, the whole circle of their
mindset was around God, you know,

to please God and this and that.

I was raised in a very religious home and
the disappointment has been so great,

that when I, you know nights
when I can't sleep I think about it.

My belief has been destroyed.
The big issue will never be resolved.

That is what Eli Wiesel
at the end of his life said: Why?

In one frame of my grandfather's film,
at three minutes, 33 seconds,

28th hundreds of a second on the time code,
two birds fly over the market square.

In one frame of my grandfather's film,
at three minutes, 33 seconds,

28th hundreds of a second on the time code,
two birds fly over the market square.

Perhaps you have noticed,
the quality of the footage varies.

We had a special effects company
clean up the film from 1938 digitally.

Does it make people look more modern,
more contemporary?

Does it bring them closer to you?

'No other power on earth can do
what a movie camera does',

boasted the Kodak Company
in an advertisement in 1938.

'You think your memory will hold it all,
but no. It slips away, it grows dim.

Only a movie camera can bring it back
to you with all its freshness and thrill.'

Kodachrome's archival abilities,
coupled with its comparative ease of use,

made it the dominant
film stock for professionals

and amateurs for most
of the 20th century.

Now it is no longer manufactured.

We had a 3D model created
of the square in Nasielsk.

Could this provide a new way
to enter history?

Or should we stay
with the people in the film,

secured in the
footage by David Kurtz?

We look at these images and think,

in a way that the images show
the presence of these people.

But when a survivor
looks at these images they

are just tokens of a
life that they remember.

Yes, they see these images.

But it is as if they see
the world around the

images and outside the
frame of the film as well.

And one of the things that I fear most...

in the years to come is that
we will forget that absence.

But inevitably, that is going to happen.

Of course. That's what happens.

I think when we look at Greek vases...

we don't think how awful the world that
made sense of these vases is gone.

Instead we think how wonderful
we have these vases.

But doesn't photography and film differ
from other art forms in this respect?

The vase in John Keats'
poem Ode on a Grecian Urn

has a different
relation to reality.

The fact that a camera
recorded them is

evidence that these
people really have existed.

Right.

At the same time, it is
obvious that these three,

almost four minutes were
captured a long time ago.

The images have obtained a patina,
like statues or indeed vases.

And you realize that the pictures that
show them so alive, for ever young,

are old enough to serve as proof
of their probable passing as well.

So you have the absence in a way
ín that presence.

That is exactly right and I think that
this film really heightens that tension...

which is inherent in film or in photographs
in general.

My aunt was exactly the same age
as some of the survivors.

She grew up in Brooklyn.

The world that she grew up in has
disappeared as well,

and yet looking at the photographs
from Brooklyn in 1938,

it's not the same as looking at
photographs from Nasielsk in 1938,

Because of the imminence of the danger...

that these people faced and the fact
that the world that they lived in...

would be destroyed so quickly
and so soon by violence,

rather than gradually just by time.

IMAGES FROM "OUR TRIP
TO HOLLAND, BELGIUM,

POLAND, SWITZERLAND,
FRANCE AND ENGLAND, 1938"

COURTESY OF
IN MEMORY OF

INTERWIEVS WITH

NARRATION
WITH THE VOICES OF

MUSIC BY

DESCENDANTS OF THE JEWISH CITIZENS
OF NASIELSK ERECTED A MEMORIAL

FOR THE GROUND OF THE JEWISH
CEMETERY IN NASIELSK IN MARCH 2021.

THE MEMORIAL INCLUDES THE
RECOVERED WINDOWS OF THE

SYNAGOGUE, THE LAST
MENANTS OF A 400-YEAR HISTORY.

ALL OF THE GRAVESTONES
FROM THE CEMETERY WERE

REMOVED AND DESTROYED
DURING THE HOLOCAUST.

THE POLISH GOVERNMENT
HAS RECOGNISED NASIELSK'S

JEWISH CEMETERY AS A
NATIONAL HISTORIC LANDMARK.

A MURAL COMMEMORATING THE
FILAR BUTTON FACTORY, DEVELOPED BY

LOCAL INITIATIVE, WAS UNVEILED
IN NASIELSK IN NOVEMBER 2021