‘Three Minutes in Poland’ offers a view of life lost

A series of coincidences led author Glenn Kurtz to Maurice Chandler’s living room in Boca Raton, Fla. It was a reunion of sorts, a spectacular twist of fate shared by two people who might otherwise never have crossed paths. 

What brought them together? Three minutes, to be exact, of a restored film reel.

Kurtz had a home movie from 1938, filmed by his grandfather, David, while traveling abroad on a European summer vacation.

One year before the Holocaust, Kurtz’s grandparents returned to the old country equipped with a 16mm Kodachrome camera to visit their family’s origins in humble Polish shtetls, among other destinations, and also to travel to Paris, Amsterdam and the Swiss Alps.

Overall, the film they brought back contains 14 minutes of footage. But three minutes in particular are what united Kurtz and Chandler. 

The short film, which depicts a vibrant pre-World War II portrait of a community of 3,000 Jews who lived in Nasielsk, just 45 miles north of Warsaw, was shown on Nov. 19 to a packed house at Wilshire Boulevard Temple for a presentation organized by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Afterward, Kurtz sat down with Leslie Swift, the museum’s chief of film, oral history and recorded sound, to discuss the near-miraculous unraveling of events.

The lights dimmed and the film, projected onto a screen, showed candid scenes from inside a restaurant, outside a synagogue and on the streets. It includes an old man with a long silver beard (the gravestone chiseler), a woman in an ankle-length dress (a bride) and a crowd of rambunctious kids scrambling to be in one shot.

Chandler was one of those kids.

Back in 2011, the museum had added this footage to its Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archive, and that’s how Chandler’s granddaughter, Marcy Rosen, who was researching Nasielsk, first saw the film. While watching the digitized video, she immediately recognized her grandfather at 14 years old, even though he was only on the screen for a matter of seconds.

“He was 73 years younger than she’d ever seen him,” Kurtz later said in a private conversation, marveling at her discovery. “That’s mindboggling. That’s incredible!” 

“The film felt to me like my inheritance,” Kurtz told the synagogue gathering, in fact finding the discovery coincided with his father’s passing.

Kurtz had never met his grandfather, and although his grandmother lived well into her 90s, she never talked about that fateful trip during the summer of ’38. So when he came across the movie, he said, “It was a complete mystery to me.”

Kurtz began looking again for the film after writing a novel about a guy, much like himself, who by chance found an old video and became obsessed with the people captured in the film.

“It was only because of writing that and researching the ways in which old film deteriorates, that I remembered my family had these old home movies.”

There’s one problem with old films, known as the “vinegar syndrome”: When 16mm film deteriorates, it produces acetic acid, the primary acid in vinegar.

“I sniffed the old movies,” he explained, “and the one that smelled most like vinegar, I figured was the oldest.”

Kurtz said he remembers watching that same film when he was a kid. “My father would haul up the old projector from the basement, and we’d watch it on the wall of the den,” the author reminisced. 

“We’d never considered it as anything other than Grandma’s and Grandpa’s vacationing film. As a result, it sat in the closet for 50 years without anybody thinking what else it might contain.”

He recovered the reel stowed away in a hot and humid Palm Beach closet. The conditions were less than desirable for the preservation of old acetate film.

By the time he found the footage, it wasn’t playable, and had fused into what Kurtz described as a “hockey puck.” 

But in the 1980s, his family had converted the reel to a VHS format. So when he found the “hockey puck,” he turned to the VHS to get an idea of the 16mm’s content. 

The film’s opening sequence contains a title screen with the words “Our Trip to Holland, Belgium, Poland, Switzerland, France and England.”  

Typed beneath that header is the date “1938.”

“It was then that I realized that the film my grandparents had taken had such historical value.”

Realizing its significance, Kurtz donated the reel to the Holocaust Museum, which has state-of-the art film facilities. 

It took four months of restoration work before the acetate film (which had endured considerable shrinkage) softened up enough to be unwound. 

The museum then digitized and photographed the film frame by frame.

“The film is silent,” Kurtz said, “literally and figuratively. It didn’t tell me what I was looking at. And so, it was very abstract — what I was looking for — until that amazing event when Mr. Chandler’s granddaughter recognized him in the film.”

The connection spawned a domino effect of revelations, which Kurtz chronicles in his book, “Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film.” 

“This story has been marked by coincidences large and small that are just profound,” Kurtz marveled.

In October, Kurtz organized a trip with 50 people to return to Nasielsk; it was the largest assembly of Jews in that town since 1939. 

“I just feel uncomfortable there,” Kurtz said of Nasielsk, explaining, “There are a handful of other places where I don’t speak the language. And it’s not that. It’s something else. It’s hard to describe. Just the sense of being in a place of horror.”

The footage, a visual memento, also allows for a before-and-after comparison. 

“The burden of what we know and the innocence of their not knowing — it’s almost intolerable,” Kurtz said of watching the film.

“If I had the opportunity to speak with [the Jewish martyrs of Nasielsk] in an imaginary way now, I would say, ‘I tried my best to honor your memory.’ ”

Years after the home movie was filmed, Kurtz sat in retiree-haven Boca Raton and shared his grandparents’ footage with Chandler. 

“My God, I had a mother and I had a grandmother,” Chandler told Kurtz. “You’ve given me back my childhood.”

Click here for a review of Kurtz’s book “Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film.”