An alum’s book tells how a forgotten reel of film unlocked memories of village life in 1930s Poland found the reel of 16mm film buried in his parents’ closet in 2009 It was a home movie his grandparents had shot of their 1938 European vacation—snippets of a ferry ride in Holland There were also a few minutes of footage from a Polish town called Nasielsk with children on the street grinning into the camera It didn’t take Kurtz long to realize he was looking at the last glimpse of a thriving Jewish community He later learned that of the nearly 3,000 Jews who lived in the town at the time Kurtz tracked down a woman who had been a young child in Nasielsk at the time but her memory was so clouded by time and trauma that he gave up hope of learning anything about the town two-and-a-half years after he unearthed the film he received an email out of the blue from a woman in Detroit Holocaust Memorial Museum and made available online and recognized an apple-cheeked boy in the crowd as her grandfather he was blessed with vivid recall of Nasielsk He told Kurtz about the clothing store his family owned; the Glodek family who owned the bicycle shop; Fishl Perelmuter who painted the biblical murals on the synagogue walls; and Chamnusen Cwajghaft Kurtz would later call Chandler “the film’s Rosetta Stone,” the bridge between the past and the present that would make all the other connections possible Kurtz spent four years rebuilding a memory of the town Poland and Israel and across the United States to interview a handful of other Nasielsk survivors and scour archives and libraries The story that took shape was by necessity through the eyes of people who were children when the war began “It has a tremendous impact on what is remembered,” Kurtz says in a phone interview from his home in New York City or such mischief as stealing buttons off coats at the back of the synagogue or eating a piece of ham from the Polish butcher—the ultimate rebellion in a kosher household “As kids they lack an overview of the situation,” Kurtz says or the relationship between Poland and Germany it makes it a more intimate memory.” Their stories sometimes come alive with details: the taste of the fermented bread-and-fruit drink kvass the liver-and-onions smell that accompanied the town ascetic the odor of acid and freshly welded metal from the tinsmith’s shop But the interviews also show inconsistencies and trailings-off Kurtz is gentle with an interviewee who starts to blend reality with the plot of Sophie’s Choice The author is relying on “the texture of an 80- or 90-year-old’s memories,” and resists the urge to fill in the gaps “I realized that I couldn’t tell what it was like,” he said and if you pretend that we can leap over that loss and just be there I think we are avoiding the truth of what happened because you can see in a sense the fragility of the very little bit that has remained.” are the memories that still bring nightmares: of hundreds of Nasielsk Jews being locked in the synagogue and made to scrape Perelmuter’s murals off with their fingernails; of relatives being forced to strip and bathe in the icy river before being loaded onto suffocating train cars to the ghettos; of running through a gauntlet of bat- and gun-wielding soldiers to reach Soviet-occupied Poland; of years spent posing as a Catholic and knowing that the slightest slip into Yiddish would mean death Kurtz had hoped to find out more about his own family including the grandfather who made the film was born in Nasielsk but raised in New York.) Yet it was the people in the background of the film that Kurtz ended up learning the most about recounting how several generations of Nasielsk descendants have connected over this small piece of celluloid of the depth of the emotional connection that would be created.” he likens himself to a switchboard operator “connecting long-distance messages from one end of the Nasielsk Diaspora to another.” The significance hits home when he shows some Nasielsk photos he has collected to a 90-year-old survivor in Israel who is being treated for cancer The sickly man seems suddenly to become an excited boy looking at the face of his father for the first time since 1939 Nothing remains of Jewish Nasielsk but fragments Julie Flaherty can be reached at julie.flaherty@tufts.edu A version of this story first appeared in the Summer 2015 issue of Tufts Magazine A new documentary extends 200 seconds of home-movie footage shot in Poland in 1938 into a forensic examination of a community obliterated by the Nazis every now and again I come across old photos of family holidays or of me and my sisters – but sometimes I find myself focusing on the other holidaymakers in the background in their own deckchairs or building their own sandcastles: strangers who were caught by our camera and preserved for ever There is something of that sensation – the random serendipity of the tourist’s lens – at work in a mesmerising new film called Three Minutes: A Lengthening and yet all the images you see come from the same three (or nearly four) minutes of amateur home-movie footage – those 200-odd seconds of cine film played in full once at the beginning and once again at the end sequences are played backwards or forwards Some frames are magnified to such an extent that what we see is a kind of microscopic blur The original three-minute film was shot with barely a thought by an American man on vacation in Europe decades ago but this new documentary invites us to stare with rare intensity at the people who happened to find themselves in front of his lens We do so because of when and where it was shot. For the man with the camera was a New Yorker visiting Poland in August 1938 and he took the film in Nasielsk a small town about 30 miles north of Warsaw The people he photographed were Nasielsk’s Jews who made up nearly half the town’s population would soon be sentenced to death by the Nazis It means that almost every face you look at – every bearded old man and every boy grinning and waving at the camera – is someone who would be shipped out of Nasielsk and confined to a ghetto and then taken from the ghetto to the death camp of Treblinka chanced upon the story via a Facebook post “I was immediately very fascinated by it,” she says on a visit to London ahead of a screening next week that will include a Q&A but in colour it’s even more rare and gives you a very different relationship to what you see It makes it much more vivid and feels much closer to you And I was watching it – getting really into it – and then it was over.” That’s when the idea struck her: “Wouldn’t it be great if we could make it last longer somehow to keep this past in our present for a bit longer?” As the author of a book on Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation Stitger was used to zeroing in on the granular detail: her book goes “street by street Where did the Germans have their headquarters Because that’s the thing that gets forgotten the quickest because no one’s going to put up a plaque like Except Stigter was not a film-maker; she wrote about movies the Rotterdam film festival invited film critics to make their own video essays It took several years – her first attempt extended the three-minute movie to about 25 minutes – but now it’s ready to be seen Perhaps the key element is the discovery of one of the people behind those faces A young woman in the US had found the film online and was scanning the crowd of young boys when one struck her instantly: “It’s Grandpa!” The woman had never seen any photographs of the young Maurice Chandler – no pictures had survived – but his face Stigter and Kurtz would travel to Detroit to interview Chandler one of perhaps a handful of the 3,000 Jews of pre-war Nasielsk to survive It’s through Chandler that we learn of the different styles of boys’ caps those that marked out students at the religious academy We learn that there was a button factory nearby subsequently seized by the Nazis from its Jewish owners and that a childhood prank was for kids to lop off the buttons from the adults’ coats save for a still photograph among the final credits Stigter imposed a rule on herself: the only images we would see throughout the hour would be from the original footage forensic effort to decode the name of a grocer’s shop from an impossibly blurred sign or the quest to identify Nasielsk itself deduced by a distinctive lion engraving on the wooden door of the synagogue The film pays a kind of sacred attention to detail taking as read that every possible fact that can be gleaned from those three minutes truly counts No one would obsess over three minutes of footage taken in The film itself offers an answer towards the close Glenn Kurtz explains that what makes these pictures exceptional is “The imminence of the danger that these people faced and the fact that the world they lived in would be destroyed so quickly and so soon and by violence rather than gradually and just by time.” That prompts conflicting emotions in us as we watch it there’s this tension – that we know what is going to happen and they don’t know So that gives incredible tension to these images – images that But because of the history that happened afterwards She is right about that. The horror of the Holocaust can render even the mundane – a glimpse of someone emerging from a grocer’s shop – tragic and profound Because that glimpse is of a world that has not only vanished means watching such footage can feel like an act of remembrance this is a film about people and their culture that the Nazis tried to erase completely,” says Stigter “So having this material feels like a kind of resistance to that erasure: we have something that we shouldn’t have if they [the Nazis] had their way.” She calls it “a small ‘You have a feeling of closeness but also of tension’ … some of the children in Three Minutes: A Lengthening Photograph: US Holocaust Memorial MuseumI put to Stigter the question that confronts all those who explore this area: given how much has been said or written about the Holocaust “It’s something we probably will never get to terms with because the more you know I will have an understanding.’ But now I know that will not happen That notion finds visual expression in the film when the Jews of Nasielsk were rounded up in the town square lashed with braided whips and beaten with steel bars before being packed into cattle cars and sent away – while local Poles but what we see is an image of the cobbled square slowly magnified and magnified until all we can make out is an indistinct blur “How do we come to terms with something like that It’s a film; you don’t have to give the answers a little bit of the answer is in the details.” Three Minutes: A Lengthening will screen in cinemas with a recorded Q&A featuring Bianca Stigter Steve McQueen and Helena Bonham Carter on 30 November It is on general release and on Curzon Home Cinema from 2 December A single frame from David Kurtz’s 1938 footage of Nasielsk Courtesy of United States Holocaust Memorial Museum This is an adaptation of Looking Forward, a weekly email from our editor-in-chief sent on Friday afternoons. Sign up here to get the Forward’s free newsletters delivered to your inbox The faces of the children follow you as you watch the haunting documentary “Three Minutes: A Lengthening.” They keep popping up in the worn frames of the rare 1938 footage from a Jewish neighborhood in a small town in Poland and the silent footage is played over and over and over again throughout the 70-minute film The children look straight at you as you sit in your comfortable seat in a suburban movie theater in 2022 thinking of your own children’s faces as you watch these children whose names you will never know There’s the girl in the faded red dress staring in wonder at this strange new thing they have no idea what is about to happen to them They do not know that in a year they and their friends their parents and their grandparents and all the 3,000 Jews in this little town will be marched from the town square and squeezed into cattle cars They do not know that all but a handful of the scores of faces in this film will soon be erased from this Earth It was the 1970s and he was growing up in his own comfortable suburb — Roslyn — and remembers his parents showing it to him a couple of times The footage was shot by his immigrant grandfather who ran a company that manufactured boys’ shirts and died before Glenn was born It was part of a 14-minute travelogue of a European adventure that included Paris “We just watched it like a home movie,” the younger Kurtz recalled when we spoke by phone yesterday “No one thought of it as anything other than grandma and grandpa’s vacation footage.” Kurtz was working on a novel about someone who finds an old home movie in a flea market and becomes obsessed with identifying the people in it He went to his parents’ home in Florida and dug the footage out of the back of a closet Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington miraculously restored the film became obsessed with identifying the people in it no one even knew which town in Poland was depicted Years of meticulous research resulted in Kurtz’s 2014 book “Three Minutes in Poland,” and then this remarkable documentary directed by Bianca Stigter which debuted a year ago at the Venice Film Festival and was released in theaters on Aug It also led to the creation of the Nasielsk Society an informal network of 300 descendants of the few survivors from this town the group helped erect the first memorial to the thousands of Jewish residents lost in the Shoah and Kurtz has been working with teachers in Nasielsk to bring the town’s lost Jewish history into school curriculums a handful more artifacts have been uncovered from Nasielsk most recently a 1937 photo from the town’s yeshiva that includes Maurice Chandler one of the boys in the newsboy caps in the Kurtz footage and one of two survivors whose voices you hear in the documentary A professor in Amsterdam who works with facial recognition software is hoping to match other faces from the yeshiva photo with those faces following the camera in “Three Minutes.” “That’s what this project has been about — just connecting these fragments that are floating around in isolation in someone’s drawer or in an archive somewhere,” said Kurtz “The hope is that the more pieces we’re able to assemble the closer we’re able to come to identify someone or at least to being able to provide a context for their lives.” The footage he’d viewed as just another home movie as a child looked different once he “became an adult with a historical consciousness,” Kurtz explained ‘I am responsible for the memory of these people If I don’t figure out who they are probably no one will and their memory will be lost.'” only about a dozen of the 153 faces in “Three Minutes” have been identified with a walk-through of the painstaking process Kurtz and others pursued to determine the name of the owner of the grocery store shown in his grandfather’s footage Not far from the synagogue — which itself was identified by the carving of a Lion of Judah on one of its doors — the film shows a doorway with a small sign over it that says “Grocery” in Polish The letters on the sign that would indicate the proprietor were unrecognizable due to the graininess of the footage A Polish researcher took the shapes of the least washed-out letters — the first one had a loop at the top so could have been a P B or R; another was almost certainly a W — and pored through business directories from the time to ultimately determine that the store was owned by someone named Ratowski to see this small mystery solved before your eyes Though we would be fooling ourselves to think that knowing the name of the owner of the grocery store owner means we understand the horror of what happened to him any better when Stigter pulls thumbnail portraits of everyone who appears for even a single frame in the original footage into a 17 x 9 grid The camera Kurtz’s grandfather carried with him on his European adventure was a Ciné-Kodak Magazine 16 mm introduced the year before his grandson bought five of them on eBay for between $25 and $40 each “I learned quite a bit by having it in my hand,” he told me “The whole thing is the size of a paperback book You wind it up and that provides the power for the motor so the longest shot that you can make depends on the strength of the spring.” Which explains why the three minutes is mainly made up of what feels like a loop of short spurts panning a crowd of faces the children seemingly chasing the camera as it moves along Kurtz took his new-old cameras with him to Nasielsk in 2014 the year his book was published and the 75th anniversary of the deportation of the town’s Jews or relatives of people like his grandfather who had left Nasielsk before the war the largest group of Jews to grace the town since that fateful day in 1939 “There’s something about the nature of this history that makes people from the same town feel connected in a real way,” Kurtz said “People in the film are undoubtedly relatives of mine I am responsible for the memory of these people If I don’t figure out who they are probably no one will and their memory will be lost and from 2008 to 2015 hosted “Conversations on Practice,” a series of discussions of the writer’s life with authors including Patti Smith He’s visited Nasielsk eight times over the last decade showing his grandfather’s footage at schools and libraries and last year screening “Three Minutes: A Lengthening” in the town theater for a crowd that included the mayor Kurtz is also now president of the Nasielsk Society which he sees as a third iteration of the “landsmanshaftn,” the networks of immigrants from the old country that were active in New York City in the early 1900s and the period after World War II During the 2014 visit with the 50 other Nasielsk descendants he shot some footage on the Ciné-Kodak Magazine 16 mm He said he hopes to someday use that footage in another documentary “it’s in my closet,” Kurtz laughed But not to worry: “It’s on my computer as well.” Jodi Rudoren served as editor-in-chief of the Forward from 2019-2025. She previously spent 21 years at The New York Times, including a stint as Jerusalem bureau chief, and returned to the The Times as Editorial Director for Newsletters. Twitter: @rudoren. [email protected]@rudoren The views and opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Forward. Discover more perspectives in Opinion. To contact Opinion authors, email [email protected] I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward American Jews need independent news they can trust At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S rising antisemitism and polarized discourse This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism you rely on See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up Copyright © 2025 The Forward Association This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks The action you just performed triggered the security solution There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase You can email the site owner to let them know you were blocked Please include what you were doing when this page came up and the Cloudflare Ray ID found at the bottom of this page Jewish townspeople of the village of Nasielsk If the pandemic has taught Hollywood anything Witness two new documentaries in which first-time directors not only deal with memory and loss but also embed them in cameras and images Alex Pritz's look at a threatened Indigenous community in Brazil shows how cameras can be weapons Bianca Stigter's striking exercise in cinematic forensics reinvents form — turning three minutes and 33 seconds of pre-WWII vacation footage into a 69-minute detective story Stigter begins by playing all of her footage — every second — accompanied only by the sound of a shutter clicking in a projector children laughing as they crowd toward the cameraman and then scooting across cobblestones to stay in the frame as he turns One boy in a cap playfully pretends to strangle the girl standing next to him A family dines in a restaurant as kids peer in the window It's all remarkable for not being remarkable...at first "These three minutes of life were taken out of the flow of time by David Kurtz in 1938," says narrator Helena Bonham Carter discovered them in 2009 in a closet in Palm Beach Gardens nothing to indicate where the footage was shot Kurtz was initially at a loss as to what he was viewing His relatives guessed the images might have come from his grandmother's hometown near the Polish-Ukrainian border but it turned out to be his grandfather's birthplace As the shots were clearly from the Jewish quarter Kurtz donated the film to the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. which had it digitized and placed for public viewing on its website And as Kurtz kept searching for clues to the identities of the people on screen — deciphering grocery store signs hints from clothing — he was contacted by a woman who recognized her grandfather And he recognized others in the crowd – a pal from yeshiva...another boy his mother wouldn't let him play with Working from Glenn Kurtz's book Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film Stigter (who is married to 12 Years A Slave director Steve McQueen) never reaches for visuals outside the original footage But she finds fresh fascination in those images every time she revisits them — fragmenting and replaying moments which occasions Chandler's liveliest childhood story as well as the narrator's observation that those buttons were likely made in the town's button factory which was repurposed by the Nazis a few years later and exhaustive — but never exhausting — exercise in cinematic forensics "That smile," growls Chandler as he looks at his beaming 13-year-old self but there are eerie echoes of many of those same elements in The Territory: marginalized people all but exterminated All captured by cameras that can freeze moments for posterity but that director Alex Pritz suggests can maybe do more than that Bitaté swims in a river near his village in the Amazon rainforest with an Indigenous community's struggle to protect what Pritz calls their "island of rainforest surrounded by farms." "the Brazilian government first contacted the Uru-eu-wau-wau people From a population of thousands fewer than 200 remain." a middle-aged non-Indigenous activist he refers to as a second mother to combat a national government that seems hellbent on destroying his home promise a cheering campaign throng that once he's in office "there won't be one more inch of Indigenous reserve." "Do you ever worry about our people disappearing?" His grandfather's response: "It's up to the next generation now." and though there's never any question where the filmmaker's sympathies lie Pritz gives them all a moment in the spotlight a 49-year-old farm worker who's spent his life laboring on other people's land which opens its meetings with prayers citing the divine calling of working with nature "If you don't claim the land," he tells his followers Sergio's doing paperwork to get government approval for a massive settlement — he envisions "a thousand families" — on what he regards as land going to waste "don't create anything; they just live here." An invader rides his motorcycle through a rainforest blaze "It makes me sick knowing we're considered criminals like we're the ones hurting the country The film finds haunting moments in this ongoing environmental tragedy — pulling the camera's focus back from farmers spraying pesticides Pairing shots of children racing through the woods with a single-file line of ants carrying leaves Flying high over the trees to contrast the sinuous curves of the Amazon with the brutally straight outlines of farms Or following Bitaté as he and his fellow activists make citizens' arrests for criminal activities the authorities would otherwise ignore A reluctant recruit when the community's elders decided to anoint him as their leader at the age of 18 And he's media-savvy enough to know he and his fellow environmental warriors need help to make their case and the presence of outsiders shooting news footage would endanger lives Bitaté tells the TV journalists he's cultivated We'll take care of it." Then he heads out with his team This makes The Territory – not unlike Three Minutes: A Lengthening — a testament not just to how loss and remembrance work Become an NPR sponsor By submitting the above I agree to the privacy policy and terms of use of JTA.org “Three Minutes: A Lengthening,” which looks into the stories of people from a small Polish town before the war traces its inspiration back to a basement in Florida (JTA) — In 2009 writer Glenn Kurtz was working on a novel about “someone who discovers an old piece of home movie footage in a flea market and becomes obsessed with identifying the people [in it],” he said in an interview earlier this year As he started researching what happens to old film he remembered that his family happened to possess some home movies and wondered what became of them This led him to a closet in his parents’ house in Palm Beach Gardens where he unearthed a film of his grandparents’ vacation to Europe in 1938 In the 14-minute film was a three-minute section of their visit to Kurtz’s grandfather’s home village of Nasielsk a town whose Jewish community would be decimated by the Holocaust not long after as his grandfather had died before he was born and his grandmother did not often talk about the distant past and I lived this story that I had been writing — I myself became obsessed with identifying the people who appeared in this film,” Kurtz said and I had this moment of shock when I realized this is probably the only footage of these people — certainly the only color moving imagery… that exists The discovery led to four years of research into the footage leading to the publication in 2014 of Kurtz’s acclaimed book “Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film.”  “These three minutes of life were taken out of the flow of time,” Kurtz wrote in his book The home movie is now the basis for a feature documentary called “Three Minutes: A Lengthening,” directed by Bianca Stigter who is also an historian and culture critic which appeared at the Toronto International and Sundance Film Festivals Glenn Kurtz spent four years researching the people who appeared in a family video he found at his family’s home in Florida (Courtesy of Family Affair Films/US Holocaust Memorial Museum) The documentary begins with the three-minute film itself and then the rest of its 70-minute running time consists of parts of that footage with off-camera narration by Helena Bonham Carter and Kurtz locations and other things in the original home movie The film does away with most documentary conventions such as scenes of talking head historians or other related footage “I wanted this… raw power of this recording to be the main focus and have the sense of stakes One of the storylines follows Maurice Chandler When Marcy Rosen watched the 1938 film on the Holocaust Museum website was interviewed for “Three Minutes: A Lengthening.”  so he has a completely different relationship to the material than most viewers.”  The three-minute film itself was not in condition to be watched at the time that Kurtz found it although Kurtz’s parents had at one point had his grandparents’ film collection transferred to VHS Kurtz donated the original film to the U.S which was able to send it to a preservation lab and digitize every frame That is the footage that is used in the new film Stigter had not previously directed a movie although she has been an associate producer on films directed by her Oscar-winning husband Steve McQueen including “12 Years a Slave” and “Widows.” The two are working on a documentary based on Stigter’s 2019 book “Atlas Of An Occupied City: Amsterdam 1940-1945.”  Much like another Holocaust-related documentary released this month, Stephen Edwards’ “Syndrome K,” the story of “Three Minutes: A Lengthening” started its journey to the screen when its director stumbled upon a Facebook post Stigter found a Facebook post about “Three Minutes in Poland,” and clicked on it finding it a “very intriguing title,” Stigter told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in an interview Learning that Kurtz had donated the three-minute film to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Stigter then watched it on the museum’s website Stigter thought it would be great to find some way to extend the footage and got the opportunity not long after that when she was asked to make a video essay by the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) The result was “Three Minutes Thirteen Minutes Thirty Minutes,” which ultimately formed the basis for the 70-minute “Three Minutes: A Lengthening.”  As for how many of the hundreds of people in the film were actually identified or some other partially identifying detail which allowed her to “solve some riddles” raised by the 1938 film Some of the structures shown in the film remain and there’s “not a lot of sense of the Jewish past,” she said she noted on a recent return visit to Nasielsk that a mural has been added and that “the Jewish history of the town is now coming more to the fore,” which she attributed to Kurtz’s book and accompanying efforts to preserve the area’s Jewish cemetery to be immersed in the Holocaust for such a long period of time sometimes it will hit you while you’re busy the film works as a kind of tool against erasure,” she said “Because there is so little known about what we see in the film everything that you discover feels like a kind of small fix… for that erasure.”  JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent I accept the Privacy Policy We use cookies to personalize content and ads and to analyze our traffic and improve our service Close looking or formal analysis can fulfill both progressive and fascist aims looking closely exposes that which hegemonic culture has hidden even) instances of bigotry or aspirations to violence close looking is likewise photographic in its worst iterations Yet as queer theorists like Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick have shown both modes of close looking come from negative emotions like paranoia so dear to how art history is done and taught becomes so often a way of looking that is incompatible with understanding marginalized people and bodies But what else is there to do when looking closely is the only means of survival and historian Bianca Stigter’s film Three Minutes – A Lengthening which screened at this year’s Sundance Film Festival lingers relentlessly on the digitized version of a single created by David Kurtz in 1938 while on a sightseeing trip in Europe David’s grandson Glenn Kurtz found the film and Stigter happened upon Glenn’s book Three Minutes in Poland on Facebook The filmic or photographic image is by nature random These three minutes record the small Polish town of Nasielsk It is the only surviving moving image of the village before World War II Nasielk’s inhabitants had likely never been filmed fill the lens with horseplay and quiet dramas which is to say a documentary of everything looking through a peephole upon pleasure and danger Stigter only allows us to see and re-see stills and clips from Kurtz’s film for the documentary’s entire runtime of sixty-nine minutes an eloquent and necessarily stuttering attempt to preserve something a desire to find something between systematic As Stigter writes in her director’s notes: “A few seconds of the recording of a café become a dance scene.” So a moment of witnessed living before the dance becomes forced movement It is hard to know what love is without seeing it again and again from all angles not so you can protect yourself from it paranoidly Three Minutes – A Lengthening reminds us that seeing and putting history back together are forms of labor Stigter’s film becomes exemplary of Sedgwick’s reparative reading a corporeal metaphor can easily become grotesque and the camera could be a form of body horror and horror at bodies Nearly everyone in Three Minutes – A Lengthening was murdered in the Holocaust was the site of a Jewish-owned button factory that was taken over by the Nazis in 1939 Perhaps Stigter uses a different kind of bodily metaphor The button cannot be truly seamless or airtight What is behind it is the body and its private memory a very material memory of its making and function and a collective memory that can be narrated and become images unable to fill their archetypal holes with archetypal buttons Stigter makes clear that the documentarian can assist those fingers Finding exactly what you are looking for is merely to create a murder mystery Three Minutes – A Lengthening will be screening at the Oxford Film Festival in Oxford Simmons is the author of Queer Formalism: The Return The director of a new film about them talks about how it was made","publisher":{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsMediaOrganization","name":"The Jewish Chronicle","url":"https://www.thejc.com","description":"Founded in 1841 Stephen Applebaum is a widely published UK-based writer with more than 25 years' of experience contributing to newspapers and glossies at home and abroad The director of a new film about them talks about how it was made Stephen Applebaum used his recently-purchased Cine-Kodak Magazine 16mm camera to film in the Jewish quarter of Nasielsk He was unaware that he was capturing some of the last images of a community that A mere 100 of Nasielsk’s 3,000 Jews survived the Holocaust Kurtz’s haunting footage is the subject of a unique documentary and wife of the acclaimed British filmmaker Steve McQueen That the material had survived was a small miracle recovered it from a closet at his parents’ home in Florida He donated it to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington which immediately sent it to a colour lab for restoration He was lucky: in the same way that there has been a race against time to collect survivor testimonies the fragile physical nature of the material meant that time was of the essence here Stigter learned of the footage’s existence in 2014 when Glenn wrote a Facebook post publicising his book Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film He said anyone who wanted to watch the film could do so at the USHMM website which is very rare for images from that time and place,” says Stigter laugh and mug as they crowd before Kurtz’s lens cheerfully jostling each other for a place in the frame “You really get the feeling that they’re looking right at you,” says Stigter In locations that later played a harrowing role in the final hours and minutes of the Jewish presence in Nasielsk and casually walk across a cobbled square lined with linden trees suggesting Kurtz had just “pressed a button” She was fascinated by its “time-machine quality” and by seeing something “that was supposed to be erased completely by the Nazis [The images] have a home-movie ordinariness they become very extraordinary.” At just three-and-a-bit minutes wouldn’t it be great if you could spend some more time with these people to keep it in our presence a bit longer.’” Stigter was not then a filmmaker “so I didn’t do anything with this thought” the Critics’ Choice section of the International Film Festival Rotterdam invited her to make a video essay and she approached Glenn to ask for his permission to use the footage was that it would be treated very generically But when he found out that I wanted the opposite that I wanted to find out as much information [as possible] and treat the people we see as much as individuals as we can we were on the same wavelength.” After making the 2015 short film Three Minutes Thirteen Minutes Thirty Minutes and sought out a producer to help her expand it “And then we worked on it for five years more,” she says Three Minutes — A Lengthening begins with Kurtz’s footage played in full and pulling out specific details in order to make what we are seeing feel richer and more present Most important are the faces that repeatedly command our attention Of the 153 individuals Stigter lifted from the footage to create a moving memorial that fills the screen the specialist she asked to isolate the faces returned with only 40 thinking some were too fuzzy for her to use Everybody we can recognise as a person should be in it.’ It might be the last trace that is visible of someone,” she explains now “So I wanted to get everyone from the background into the foreground at least for a second.” Stigter never cuts away from Kurtz’s film and the voices of experts and Holocaust survivors or an archeological operation where Kurtz’s film is “the remnant from the past” Glenn’s obsession with discovering names established for Stigter how difficult it was to find out information about people Since the Nazis had tried to wipe out not just Europe’s Jews but everything about their world as well “you feel that kind of idea of erasure happening” anything we could find out became a kind of small small victory over that erasure.” When Bonham Carter reels off seemingly superfluous facts about linden trees (leading to some surprising connections) “I was in a lot of rabbit holes,” confirms Stigter she included the information about the trees because it was something they could find out And you can show that contrast and frustration.” This idea is at its starkest around midway through the documentary distressing account of the round-up of the town’s Jews taken from the Ringelblum Archive in Warsaw No photographic evidence of the event is known to exist and the only visual links to it in Kurtz’s footage are the town’s square and the outside of the synagogue moves slowly and hypnotically closer to the cobblestones of the former until they lose their definition and become a blurry jumble Our imaginations are left to paint the violence and degradation described in the witness testimony “Absence can be as telling as presence,” she says this is also about the difference between written and visual sources and making you aware of those.” The documentary plays with these tensions and Stigter says that because we know the fate of most of the happy you’re so close to these people that suddenly we can look them in the eye we cannot cross time and warn them; they are locked in that piece of film So in that sense there’s the illusion of nearness that film can bring but then the devastating realisation that it is just an illusion.” There were few signs that Nasielsk’s Jews had ever existed when she first visited the town (this has now changed thanks largely to Glenn and descendants of other survivors) to record sounds and do interviews Steve McQueen and Bianca Stigter (GettyImages) Indentations on doorposts where mezuzahs had been were ghostly echoes of a world that never came back to life because most survivors “went to places like Israel or America” She heard that gravestones from a Jewish cemetery on the edge of town had been used to build a Second World War airstrip after his granddaughter recognised him as a 13-year-old in the film and he is one of two survivors whose voices appear in the documentary “Mr Chandler was not present during the round-up,” she says where he managed to escape again from the ghetto.” When Chandler saw Kurtz’s film for the first time because he didn’t have anything to show of his past “Now he had a little fragment that he could show.” Stigter is hopeful that other names might be revealed as more people see Kurtz’s footage following the discovery of a photograph from 1937 of boys in a yeshivah class in Nasielsk a professor in Amsterdam is using facial-recognition software to try and find matches with boys who are shown in the film Another frame from the original film (US Holocaust Memorial Museum) a dentist friend of Stigter noticed that two people have gaps in their teeth “I never thought about looking at teeth to see relationships between people,” the director exclaims Considering how Three Minutes — A Lengthening could add to our understanding of the Holocaust she says:“I think there’s a difference between knowing something and really realising that something happened the Holocaust can seem like an abstraction Here you can see it happened to one person at a time To a child with a funny gap between his teeth And to an old lady with a red headscarf.” Three Minutes – A Lengthening is released on 2 December Film Holocaust remembrance Holocaust Glenn Kurtz was several hundred pages into his first novel when he got the email that made him stuff it in a drawer for good Kurtz was writing a fictionalized account of a man who becomes obsessed with the characters in an old home movie when he discovered his own: a historic family movie on 16 mm film He found it in the closet of his parents’ house in Palm Beach Gardens He was researching the way film degrades for accuracy in his novel when he had it restored and recorded to DVD The shaky but clear black-and-white film showed his Jewish grandparents on vacation through Europe in 1938 — just before the outbreak of World War II it showed his grandfather visiting the small town of Nasielsk a year before the Nazis would invade the town of 3,000 — and slaughter all but about 80 of its residents “I understood the first moment I saw the film that it was something historic,” Kurtz said All traces of Nasielsk would have been lost a descendant of that town stumbling upon Kurtz’ restored film online Although the story reads like the novel he might have written, Kurtz’s new book dutifully and painstakingly researched account of life in one small Polish town before it was decimated under Nazi rule “You can’t bring it back to life — the people who lived there were killed,” Kurtz said by phone from his home in California “What I was able to do was preserve the memory of that town … The town of Nasielsk is representative of all the Polish lives that were destroyed.” Kurtz tried in vain to find out more about the wiped-out town on his family film before donating it to Yad Vashem the central Holocaust memorial and archive in Israel in 2009 His dad died shortly after he found the film A woman in Michigan was trying to research her family’s ancestry to the town of Nasielsk when she came across Kurtz’ video in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum online archives She was stunned to recognize her grandfather smiling and photobombing tourists from America as a boy she called her parents and grandparents in Boca Raton She emailed a link of the video to her grandmother who gasped when she saw the film of her husband He came in from the other room and confirmed it: It was him on the tape Kurtz was on a plane to Boca Raton to meet Maurice Chandler Maurice Chandler was born Moszek Tuchendler He was the only Holocaust survivor in his family and survived only because a family friend falsified papers saying he was a Roman-Catholic Pole named Zdzislaw Plywacz He lived under that identity until the war ended adopted the Americanized moniker Maurice Chandler and “became an American success story,” Kurtz said He started a successful scrap metal recycling business happy family that included a granddaughter bent on tracing her genealogy I just wanted to put it behind me and start over again,” Chandler told Kurtz over the phone in response to questions from The Palm Beach Post “There’s a saying in Yiddish … ‘Whoever gets slapped keeps that slap.’ You can’t share it with somebody I thought about memories that keep floating in my mind Chandler became the author’s “Rosetta stone” on this journey Chandler put him in touch with other Nasielsk survivors until he found eight (Recent DNA tests showed Kurtz and Chandler are between second and fourth cousins.) Kurtz began to recreate what the town was like before the Holocaust I don’t think it would have all come together in the form that it did,” he said it is filled with stories — stories of an average little town in Europe before it was ground by the millstone of the world’s most destructive war But thanks to Kurtz’ work — the restored video the anthologies of a town — all was not lost “It still remains pictures of grandma and grandpa’s vacation it’s also this historical document of great significance,” he said Kurtz and more than 50 former residents and descendants visited Nasielsk together With his new 16mm Ciné-Kodak camera, Kurtz recorded three minutes of footage in his old Jewish community around the Nasielsk town square People poured outdoors or lingered where they were to be filmed Many of them were children and adolescents who smiled German soldiers armed would brutally herd Nasielk's 3,000 Jews to the local railway station for deportation and ghettoisation About eighty survived the Nazi extermination Kurtz's footage was discovered by his grandson New York City-based author and professor Glenn Kurtz in a cupboard in his parents' Florida home in 2008 He could tell from a segment that had been transferred to VHS that it was invaluable He sent it to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum to be restored Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film (2014) The book and the footage inspired the Dutch historian Bianca Stigter to direct the documentary Three Minutes: A Lengthening It is a formidable work of investigation and memorialisation precisely because Stigter shot nothing new for it but relies on David Kurtz's three minutes of film which she parsed forensically to identify as much as possible the people and places it shows but one who did was then-13-year-old Maurice Chandler whose voice as a nonagenarian joins Glenn Kurtz's and narrator Helena Bonham Carter's on the soundtrack.  Stigter – who served as associate producer on her artist-filmmaker husband Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave (2013) and Widows (2018) – talked at length to The Arts Desk ahead of tonight's UK Jewish Film Festival screening of Three Minutes: A Lengthening at London's Curzon Mayfair GRAHAM FULLER: When did you first see David Kurtz's footage and how did it affect you BIANCA STIGTER: I first saw it at the end of 2014 on the website of the Holocaust Memorial Museum where you can still see it today I was alerted to it because of a post on Facebook about Glenn Kurtz’s book It's a piece of film that immediately gives you a lot of conflicting emotions and thoughts What made it special for me was that it’s in colour Usually images from that part of history are black and white colour footage of a Jewish part of a town in Poland in the late 1930s is scarce especially of these kids who are trying to to stay in the frame You really have the feeling that they are  looking at you you feel very far away because you know what will happen to them soon after this material was filmed – and they don't “Get out!” But they can't hear you because it's a piece of film Did you think immediately that the footage should be brought to a wider public Wouldn't it be great if we could somehow extend the experience of engaging with what we see but the Rotterdam film festival had just started its Critics' Choice program of video essays and asked me if I wanted to make one this is my chance to try to do something with this material I very quickly contacted Glenn Kurtz and interviewed him and made a short film [Three Minutes Thirteen Minutes Thirty Minutes] we presented at the 2015 Rotterdam festival But I still had the feeling I could do so much more with this material I knew that I just wanted to use the old footage and not film anything myself But I went to Nasielsk to look around and to record the sounds of the town as it is now The synagogue is gone but the houses are still there in the part of the square you see in the footage because buildings can change more than you might imagine When you look at the buildings by the canals in my hometown of Amsterdam you might think they’re the same as they were three hundred years ago and stairs change and parts of other buildings can be put on top of them We needed an old photo to confirm we’d found the exact location in Nasielsk Linden trees are still there but they’re too small to be the ones that were there in the 1930s And the mezuzahs shown in the film are gone [Mezuzahs are decorative cases for parchment inscribed with Hebrew verses from the Shema Yisrael prayer in the Torah But when I returned in May to screen the film in a cinema that existed in 1938 – and which is just a stone’s throw from where the footage was shot – I was told the mezuzah in the school had disappeared Such vestiges of Jewish community life in Europe are vitally important – all that remains The Nazis not only murdered the Jewish people they also tried to erase the culture completely What’s important for me is that anything we can find feels as if it’s a small victory against this erasure One of the marvels of Three Minutes: A Lengthening is how you built on Glenn Kurtz’s detective work into his grandfather’s footage by both deconstructing and reconstructing it a remarkable panoramic still from David Kurtz’s panning shot of so many of the Nasielsk Jews Then there is the astonishing face-by-face assembly into a single image of all the people that appear in the film I wanted to get at the footage any which way I could I had the idea for the [assembled] portraits very early on The faces that appear in the film are often the only traces that are left of those people which is a kind of indication by itself of the scale of the Holocaust they are foreground – and I wanted to make everyone After I first discussed this idea with the very good special effects man we worked with he came back with forty faces or something The fact that they are blurry is telling if it's a last trace of someone and that is what we should show and that is what we should honour." For me making the film – but I hope also for people watching it – it should feel like you're partaking in some kind of memorial act I suspect different faces will resonate for every person who sees the film I was very struck by the boy with the floppy cap who keeps looking at the camera as he walks away from it Then there's the girl with the pigtails and gentle smile who appears several times many of them would have likely had children of their own five or six years afterwards We think of the Holocaust as the six milliom who were killed but it continues exponentially because of the millions unborn The way we structured the film was important We begin with the three minutes of footage and [as a viewer] you don’t know anything about it And then you get all this new information as you see things over and over again When you see the three minutes again at the end of the film you have a totally different rapport with it because you recognize people.They are no longer anonymous ceased to be an abstraction because we can see that what happened to them happened to one person at a time You have a voiceover reading of an eyewitness account [taken from the Emanuel Ringelblum Archive] of the Nazis whipping Nasielsk’s Jews as they drive them across muddy ground to the railway station for deportation The accompanying image is a blurred frame of the cobbles in the town square You could say that's the kind of thing we didn’t have to show here because we had enough of other things to show The eyewitness said that German soldiers took pictures while they were humiliating people in the square We know those kind of pictures exist from other places they might still be in an attic in Hamburg or wherever so [viewers] can think about what kind of things are filmed and not filmed is the Nasielsk survivor Maurice Chandler still alive and I stayed with him in Detroit for a few days and we recorded his thoughts and sometimes he’ll do a Q&A after a screening if he wants to but I know for sure he was happy to see the original footage Most of the survivors believed they lost everything and the whole culture they came from were destroyed there was a little fragment of film he could show to his children and say you know I'm not from Mars but come from an actual place in an actual time It’s not propaganda and it’s not even artistic David Kurtz just knew how to operate his camera It gives you that incredible feeling of immediacy and authenticity because there's no filter of any kind he changed how the people behaved and moved because they all wanted to be filmed People nowadays can relate to that experience Whereas history books can never record these moments – how people shove each other and make funny faces – footage like this can make you notice a different part of the fabric of what is memorable about a place More information about text formats We urgently need financing to survive. Our fundraising drive has thus far raised £33,000 but we need to reach £100,000 or we will be forced to close. Please contribute here: https://gofund.me/c3f6033d And if you can forward this information to anyone who might assist Thank you for continuing to read our work on theartsdesk.com For unlimited access to every article in its entirety including our archive of more than 15,000 pieces we're asking for £5 per month or £40 per year To take a subscription now simply click here. And if you're looking for that extra gift for a friend or family member, why not treat them to a theartsdesk.com gift subscription Get a weekly digest of our critical highlights in your inbox each Thursday Simply enter your email address in the box below View previous newsletters Glenn Kurtz's grandfather filmed the townspeople of Nasielsk Your purchase helps support NPR programming. How? Glenn Kurtz stumbled across some old family films in a closet in his parents' house in Florida shot more than 70 years earlier by his grandparents while on vacation in Europe turned out to include footage of his grandfather's hometown in Poland "I realized it was 1938," Kurtz tells NPR's Rachel Martin "And there are all of these beautiful images of children and adults in this town they're so excited to see these Americans coming to visit the town And of course I know something that they don't know — which is what's about to happen." Kurtz set out to restore the film (which you can watch here) and find the people in it The book based on this journey is called Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film beautiful detail of the people — their faces There's lots of kids who kind of mob my grandfather and jump up and down and wave their arms and try to get into the frame It's just this sort of commotion of these visitors coming to visit the town and everybody wants to see what's going on and be in the picture and I ultimately donated the film to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum They gave the film to a film laboratory in Maryland .. and they spent four months restoring the images 13-year-old Morris Chandler appears on the left who appears as a 13-year-old boy in the film Once the film had been restored and digitized, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum put it on their website. It was part of their collection and it was there with all of the other home movies that they have And she said that someone had brought this film to her attention and that she was sitting watching it with her father; camera pans across the crowd there are all these children jumping and waving a boy's face looked out and she saw her grandfather as a 13-year-old boy because I believe he knew your family as a child." my family and his family gathered in Florida and we watched the film together I sometimes feel like he'd been waiting his whole life to talk about this town looking at these few minutes of film and he was able to identify a number of people who he recognized immediately about people who didn't appear in the film And it was just one of the most extraordinary experiences in my life Glenn Kurtz is also the author of Practicing: A Musician's Return to Music On what it was like for Chandler to watch the film one of the things he said to me on the phone when we first spoke was "You've given me back my childhood." And I think for someone who survived the Holocaust — the tragedy of that the intense fear of that experience — just overshadows everything that came before it and makes what came before And when we were sitting and watching the film "I just can't believe that I was a kid." It was a part of his life that he couldn't even relate to anymore and one of the things that he said to me was I can show you that I'm not from Mars." He had felt that isolated in his family On the impact of the Holocaust on that town there were approximately 3,000 Jews living in the town On the stories the survivors shared with him I thought that I was going to try and recreate what the town was like what you're left with are these fragments — not only documents Some of these memories which the survivors have been willing to share with their families have become stories that are fairly polished And they tend to share with their families stories that aren't too scary — things that are even amusing or things that have I was fortunate that the survivors were willing to share with me than they'd shared with their own families they were willing to talk with me and weren't trying to protect me although they were still trying to protect themselves in some ways to get behind the polished stories that they were willing to share everything that they remember is intimately bound