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

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Part One -- 1. Artifacts -- 2. Preservation -- 3. Inheritance -- 4. People and Faces -- 5. A Sea of Ghosts -- Part Two -- 6. It's Good to be Back -- 7. Lists -- 8. Now We're Onto Something -- 9. Darkness and Rain -- 10. Das Vaterland deines Grossvaters -- 11. A Different Style of Torture -- Part Three -- 12. Something Goes From the Picture -- 13. A Town of Memories -- 14. Family History -- 15. The Story of the Film -- Epilogue -- Author's Note.
"The author's search for the annihilated Polish community captured in his grandfather's 1938 home movie. Traveling in Europe in August 1938, one year before the outbreak of World War II, David Kurtz, the author's grandfather, captured three minutes of ordinary life in a small, predominantly Jewish town in Poland on 16 mm Kodachrome color film. More than seventy years later, through the brutal twists of history, these few minutes of home-movie footage would become a memorial to an entire community--an entire culture--that was annihilated in the Holocaust. Three Minutes in Poland traces Glenn Kurtz's remarkable four-year journey to identify the people in his grandfather's haunting images. His search takes him across the United States; to Canada, England, Poland, and Israel; to archives, film preservation laboratories, and an abandoned Luftwaffe airfield. Ultimately, Kurtz locates seven living survivors from this lost town, including an eighty-six-year-old man who appears in the film as a thirteen-year-old boy. Painstakingly assembled from interviews, photographs, documents, and artifacts, Three Minutes in Poland tells the rich, funny, harrowing, and surprisingly intertwined stories of these seven survivors and their Polish hometown. Originally a travel souvenir, David Kurtz's home movie became the sole remaining record of a vibrant town on the brink of catastrophe. From this brief film, Glenn Kurtz creates a riveting exploration of memory, loss, and improbable survival--a monument to a lost world"-- Provided by publisher.

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Three Minutes in Poland submitted by leighsprauer on June 13, 2015, 10:06pm This true story - the author's search for the names and fates of the people who show up in his grandfather's 1938 home film - could have been so good. It is an incredible, and incredibly heartbreaking, story, as are all stories of Holocaust survival. But his storytelling is arduous - bogged down by too much detail, difficult to follow side stories, and general disorganization. I think it's still worth reading if you're interested in Polish history or WWII. I just wish it had been written by somebody else.

Heartbreaking submitted by debbifs on June 17, 2018, 12:04pm As a genealogist and granddaughter of Jews who left Poland (then, Russia) between the wars, I was quickly drawn into this story. Like the other reviewer, I wish that an editor had worked with Kurtz to reorganize some of the content. Whenever I sat down to read this book, I quickly became engrossed in the story. And, yet, something kept me from feeling that compulsion to read that I frequently experience with other books. Needless to say, the subject matter is often dark. Well worth reading.