Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film

Glenn Kurtz is rummaging around in his parents' closets when he discovers an old family video shot by his long-deceased grandfather in Poland in 1938. The entire video lasts roughly 14 minutes, but it is the three minutes that capture life in a Jewish community destroyed in World War II that capture his attention. Through painstaking detective work, that leads him to a number of immigrants as well as Holocaust survivors, he learns more about the film, the town, and the people in it.

I added Three Minutes in Poland to my reading list after it appeared on NPR's 2014 Best Books List (other fantastic books on the list include The Moor's Account and Lovers at the Chameleon Club, but I digress). Admittedly, it starts a bit slowly, as Kurtz explains the science behind restoring old film, for example. However, once he connects with the survivors or Nasielsk's Jewish community (no small feat given that out of a community of 3,000 fewer than 100 would survive, and that Kurtz did not begin his search for them until some 65 years after the war ended), the book transitions from rather dry scientific discourse to a testament of perseverance - that of Kurtz and of Nasielsk's survivors - and also to the strength of the human spirit.

Eighty-six-year-old Maurice Chandler, in particular, is the unsuspecting star of this book. His faculties fully in tact, he is able to recall not only the day when American visitors arrived in 1938, but so many facets of life, both large and small, about growing up in a strict religious household in the interwar years. In that sense, his experiences are often similar to those of Isaac Bashevis Singer in In My Father's Court. The context is different, of course, but the men certainly would have recognized one another's homes and experiences in their respective histories. As for Chandler's many narrow escapes from the Nazis: these are worthy of an entire book in their own right.

I would be remiss not to add that I also thought many times of anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff's formidable Number Our Days: A Tirumph of Continuity and Culture Among Jewish Old People in an Urban Ghetto, which is still one of the best assigned readings I was given in many years of graduate school.

Overall, I would say Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film is best suited to lovers of histories, and of the many coincidences that occur across the years drawing otherwise unrelated ideas, events, or individuals together. This is not a light read, but it is a worthy one.