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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