Three Minutes in Poland

From the minute Glenn Kurtz found a decaying tape of his parents’ trip to Poland in 1938, I was hooked. I’ve imagined being able to glimpse the world my grandparents inhabited in “the Old Country.” And here it was for Kurtz: some of the only film footage of a Jewish world erased by the Holocaust in the last months before it was gone forever.

I was fascinated to follow along with Kurtz as he becomes a detective working to discover who is in the recorded three minutes, where they are, and what they are doing. But that’s just the beginning;… show more.

Glenn Kurtz’s grandparents traveled to Poland in August 1938, one year before the outbreak of the Second World War, to visit family. They filmed parts of that trip, including 3 minutes in Poland, footage that ultimately became one of the last records of a once vibrant Jewish community. Decades later, Kurtz painstakingly set out to identify the people in the film. He ultimately located seven living survivors, including an eighty-six-year-old man who appeared in the film as a thirteen-year-old boy. A heartfelt and powerful telling of what it means to rescue history and stories of survival.

In this book, Kurtz recounted the discovery of a snippet of film at his parents’ home in Florida that captured pre-WWII life in Nasielsk, Poland. Fewer than 100 of the town’s 3,000 Jewish residents survived the war. Kurtz embarked on a quest to learn about the place immortalized on film, and ended up making goosebump-inducing connections with some of those 100 survivors. It’s a remarkable story of dogged research (with more than a dash of serendipity).