Three Minutes: A Lengthening (2021) Movie Script

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.

Chezkiah.

Szmuel 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

Three Minutes: A Lengthening (2021) - full transcript