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

Kurtz, Glenn

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0374535795 ISBN 13: 9780374535797

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015

Synopsis

Named one of the best books of 2014 by NPR, The New Yorker, and The Boston Globe

When Glenn Kurtz stumbles upon an old family film in his parents' closet in Florida, he has no inkling of its historical significance or of the impact it will have on his life. The film, shot long ago by his grandfather on a sightseeing trip to Europe, includes shaky footage of Paris and the Swiss Alps, with someone inevitably waving at the camera. Astonishingly, David Kurtz also captured on color 16mm film the only known moving images of the thriving, predominantly Jewish town of Nasielsk, Poland, shortly before the community's destruction. "Blissfully unaware of the catastrophe that lay just ahead," he just happened to visit his birthplace in 1938, a year before the Nazi occupation. Of the town's three thousand Jewish inhabitants, fewer than one hundred would survive.
Glenn Kurtz quickly recognizes the brief footage as a crucial link in a lost history. "The longer I spent with my grandfather's film," he writes, "the richer and more fragmentary its images became." Every image, every face, was a mystery that might be solved. Soon he is swept up in a remarkable journey to learn everything he can about these people. After restoring the film, which had shrunk and propelled across the United States; to Canada, England, Poland, and Israel; and into archives, basements, cemeteries, and even an irrigation ditch at an abandoned Luftwaffe airfield as he looks for shards of Nasielsk's Jewish history.
One day, Kurtz hears from a young woman who had watched the video on the Holocaust Museum's website. As the camera panned across the faces of children, she recognized her grandfather as a thirteen-year-old boy. Moszek Tuchendler of Nasielsk was now eighty-six-year-old Maurice Chandler of Florida, and when Kurtz meets him, the lost history of Nasielsk comes into view. Chandler's laser-sharp recollections create a bridge between two worlds, and he helps Kurtz eventually locate six more survivors, including a ninety-six-year-old woman who also appears in the film, standing next to the man she would later marry.
Painstakingly assembled from interviews, photographs, documents, and artifacts, Three Minutes in Poland tells the rich, harrowing, and surprisingly intertwined stories of these seven survivors and their Polish hometown. "I began to catch fleeting glimpses of the living town," Kurtz writes, "a cruelly narrow sample of its relationships, contradictions, scandals." Originally a travel souvenir, David Kurtz's home movie became the most important record of a vibrant town on the brink of extinction. From this brief film, Glenn Kurtz creates a poignant yet unsentimental exploration of memory, loss, and improbable survival--a monument to a lost world.

About this title

About the Author

Glenn Kurtz is the author of Practicing: A Musician's Return to Music and the host of Conversations on Practice, a series of public conversations about writing held at McNally Jackson Books in New York City.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1

ARTIFACTS

 

IN THE SUMMER of 1938, my grandparents David and Liza Kurtz sailed from New York to Europe for a six-week summer vacation. Together with three friends they visited England, France, Holland, Belgium, and Switzerland, and, passing through Germany, they made a side trip to Poland, where both my grandparents were born.

I’m holding a postcard from this trip that my grandfather sent to his daughter, my aunt. The card shows a painting of the Holland-America liner Nieuw Amsterdam crossing a green-black sea. Spray at the ship’s waterline and whitecaps on the waves give the impression of motion. The black hull and white Art Deco superstructure gleam against clouds tinged with pink and blue. Smoke ribbons from twin yellow smokestacks. A bird trails off the stern.

On the reverse side, my grandfather writes, “On the boat five days. To-morrow we land at Plymouth, England, then Boulonge, France [he misspells Boulogne]—then Rotterdam, Holland. We get off at Rotterdam.”

My aunt Shirley Kurtz Mandel produced this postcard three years after I first asked what she knew about her parents’ 1938 trip to Europe. The manila envelope containing this and about thirty other postcards and letters from David and Liza had been stuffed in a box of unrelated papers, forgotten for more than half a century. Shirley rediscovered it in late 2011 when, after sixty-three years, she moved out of her New York apartment.

One year after my grandparents’ vacation, Europe would be at war. On September 1, 1939, the German army overran Poland, and within a few years, with terribly few exceptions, the Jewish inhabitants of the Polish towns my grandparents had visited would be murdered.

But David and Liza Kurtz could not foresee the future. My grandparents and their friends were tourists, relatively prosperous American tourists, blissfully unaware of the catastrophe that lay just ahead. They rode across Europe with trunks of clothing, stayed at five-star hotels, shopped, and admired the sights. They visited art galleries and cathedrals, they strolled in the Jardin Exotique overlooking the old city of Monaco, they rode a small-gauge railroad through the Swiss Alps to the highest train station in Europe, the Jungfrau. Like tens of thousands of other Americans in the summer of 1938, my grandparents toured Europe’s grand attractions for their own pleasure.

The postcard my grandfather sent to his daughter has an English one-pence postage stamp with the cancellation “Paquebot—Posted at Sea.” It is postmarked Plymouth, Devon, 29 July 1938, 6:30 p.m. From this, I learn the date of my grandparents’ departure, July 23, 1938, and that slender fact opens onto a wealth of period detail, giving me for the first time a glimpse at the scene as my grandparents begin their voyage.

“Rains Delay Sailing of Nieuw Amsterdam,” reported the New York Times the day after their embarkation. “The Holland-America liner Nieuw Amsterdam, under command of Captain Johannes Bijl, commodore of the line, sailed from her Hoboken pier forty minutes behind schedule after awaiting the arrival of four passengers from Philadelphia who had been delayed by a washout on the highway.” The four Philadelphians, “all prominent socially,” according to the Times, had called ahead from Plainfield, New Jersey, when the road north was “hidden by swirling water.” The Nieuw Amsterdam was a stylish new ship. Its maiden voyage in May 1938, two months earlier, had been celebrated with lavish coverage in newspapers and magazines. This departure was less glamorous, the return leg of the ship’s fourth round trip, but still worth a few column inches devoted to society gossip. A July 23 piece in the Times entitled “Ocean Travelers” noted that Mrs. Adam L. Gimbel, Mrs. Mary van Renssalaer Thayer, and Mr. and Mrs. John B. Ballantine would be among the 850 people on board when the ship finally sailed under cloudy skies that Saturday. The Washington Post considered it newsworthy to report “Mr. and Mrs. E. C. Rick will sail on the Nieuw Amsterdam this month for an extended tour in England, France, Switzerland and Italy. They will visit the Empire Exposition in Glasgow, Scotland, and later they will stop at Oxford to attend lectures at the university.”

Mr. and Mrs. David Kurtz of Flatbush, Brooklyn, are not mentioned in the newspapers. They were comfortable but not prominent socially. Their travel plans concerned only the immediate family, and as a result, tracing their movements through Europe in the summer of 1938 has proved to be a challenge. I have been trying to determine their precise date of departure and the name of the ship for years. I know it now only because my aunt happened to save this postcard.

I would never have known about my grandparents’ trip at all or felt compelled to spend years trying to unearth its details had David and Liza not brought home a unique memento of their travels, which also happened to survive. On this vacation, my grandfather carried a 16mm home movie camera. He shot fourteen minutes of black-and-white and Kodachrome color film. He captured scenes of the ocean crossing and of a ferry ride in Holland. He filmed my grandmother and their friends walking in the Grand Place in Brussels, sunning themselves on the Mediterranean coast near Cannes, feeding pigeons in a Parisian park. And he documented three minutes of their visit to Poland, footage of ordinary life in a small, predominantly Jewish town, one year before the outbreak of World War II.

More than seventy years later, these few minutes of my grandfather’s home movie would transform their summer vacation into something of lasting, even of historical, significance. Through the brutal twists of history, my grandfather’s travel souvenir became the only surviving film of this Polish town. Eventually, his home movie would become a memorial to its lost Jewish community and to the entire annihilated culture of Eastern European Judaism.

What moments are worth recording? Which stories and memories are passed down, and which are lost? How much detail is preserved in the few artifacts that happen to survive? And how close can these artifacts bring us to the people who left them behind? These questions have haunted and surprised me in the years since I discovered my grandfather’s 1938 film.

*   *   *

The postcard my grandfather sent from the Nieuw Amsterdam at the start of this voyage is addressed to Shirley Kurtz at summer camp in Andes, New York. Above the ship, where the clouds are darkest gray and most roseate pink, David has written, “Thanks for the telegram.” The telegram has not survived. My grandfather’s message is only two sentences long. After briefing his daughter on their itinerary, he concludes, “Regards to the whole grand and to the Mirskys. Mother and Dad.” My aunt Shirley, now ninety-two, was sixteen years old in July 1938. She has fond memories of Camp Oquago for girls, which had opened just a few years before and was in business until 1993. The Mirskys, she tells me, were the camp’s owners. She remembers that Mr. Mirsky had a thick Yiddish accent. But she has no idea who or what “the whole grand” is. We puzzle over the word, trying to make it “gang” or “group” or “crowd.” But it says “the whole grand.” It might refer to a sports team or to her bunkmates at camp. It’s possible my grandfather made a slip of the pen. We’ll never know. Unlike the missing telegram, these words have been preserved. But their meaning is lost.

Taken by itself, it is a prosaic postcard, one of only a handful from my grandparents that has come down to me. Its value, like that of so many otherwise unimportant things, depends on context, on the scale of its information and the connections this enables us to forge, the snippet of a larger story it reveals. “On the boat five days.” “We get off at Rotterdam.” History is constructed from fragments like this, preserved by chance, puzzled over, connected. Because preservation alone is not enough. Every flea market and junk shop has shoe boxes full of postcards just like this one, with feathered edges and looping, half-legible script. All of them once carried messages woven into the fabric of individual lives. Now they’re just atmospheric old postcards. With time, information and context tend to fray. Eventually they unravel completely.

*   *   *

I found the film of my grandparents’ trip in the closet at my parents’ house in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, in 2009. As soon as I saw what was captured in its images, I knew it had to be restored. My grandfather had filmed just a few minutes of one day in Poland. But this footage preserves impressions of daily life in a way that memory, photographs, and documents cannot. Viewing the film, we see hundreds of faces with individual expressions. We see the patterns and colors of dresses, a sign over a doorway, flowers in a shop window. We see the intricacies of small-town society in the groups that form on the street. We see the way a hand gesture or the peculiar set of someone’s mouth or brow defines a personality or a relationship. We see the extraordinary pride of a young woman fortunate enough to accompany the American visitors during their brief tour of the town. We see the prevalence of shoving as a means of communication. If only for the sake of these details, I felt, the film was an important piece of history. It was evidence of a world violently destroyed.

But the longer I spent with my grandfather’s film, the richer and more fragmentary its images became. A film, by itself, preserves detail without necessarily conveying knowledge. When I first viewed the footage, I saw hundreds of people, their manners and movements, the way they responded to my grandfather’s camera and to each other. Yet each moment stood in isolation. The camera had recorded only the surfaces. Everything meaningful, everything that explained what I was seeing, existed outside or was buried inside the frame. Who are these people? What brought them to be on the street, in view of my grandfather’s lens, on that day, in that moment? What relation, if any, do they have to my grandparents? And what became of them, each one, individually? Every image, every face, was a mystery.

I began to search, to research, to find out what might still be learned from this film and what, so many years later, might still be discovered about this town and its people. It’s a challenge to reconstruct the history of ordinary lives. Ultimately, my search would absorb four years and would fling me across the United States, to Canada, England, Poland, Israel; into archives, homes, basements, film preservation laboratories, a grove of trees in a former Jewish cemetery, and an irrigation ditch at an abandoned Luftwaffe airfield—all to make sense of a few hundred feet of film. Yet in the end, chance—luck, or fate—played the biggest role in shaping this history.

Through a series of coincidences that in retrospect seem obvious, I met a man who appears in this film as a thirteen-year-old boy. He appears for a split second as my grandfather sweeps the camera past a crowd of children. This man lost everything in the Holocaust: his home, his family, his identity. But somehow he survived, and my grandfather’s home movie survived, and seventy-three years after that moment captured on film, this man was able to view the film and, in some sense, to relive the moment. His recollections give voice to the silent figures in the film. My grandfather’s film, he told me the first time we spoke, gave him back his childhood.

By circuitous paths, this man’s memories would lead me to other survivors and to the families of some of those who did not survive. From among the hundreds of faces visible in my grandfather’s film, the people I met would identify a few individuals they knew and remembered, some who lived through the war and many who did not, some who would have remained entirely unknown, and some who would have otherwise been faceless names on a document, nameless faces in an image. But more than this, the recollections that the survivors shared with me animated the images in my grandfather’s film, fleshing out with stories many of the faces we see. From these stories, often from stray remarks made years apart, an intricate web of connections would eventually grow. Fragments of memory intersected with fragments of film, with fragments found in the few documents that still exist, in postcards, letters, photographs, and artifacts. And in the interconnections of these surviving fragments, I began to catch fleeting glimpses of the living town—a cruelly narrow sample of its relationships, contradictions, scandals. In this way, it became possible to save this small Jewish community, this shtetl, from the fate of so many others that were also destroyed and that have now succumbed to the one-dimensional tyranny of lists. Like my grandfather’s film, the fragmentary history I assembled preserves a little of the town’s vibrant complexity, the details that made its life and death distinct from others and made these people different from millions like them.

*   *   *

I smooth the fraying edges of my grandfather’s postcard before placing it in an archival sleeve. Originally meant only for my aunt, this postcard is now a node in the intersecting stories that have grown out of my grandparents’ 1938 vacation, stories defined in every part by improbable survival. My grandfather probably thought nothing of it when he posted this casual greeting. I’m certain he never imagined that a grandson, seventy-five years later, would read it with amazement, or that the information it contains, prosaic as it may be, would one day shed light on the life of a Polish town destroyed in the Holocaust.

So much about the story of my grandfather’s film is untraceable. I’ll never know how my grandparents felt as their ship pulled away from the pier and put out to sea. I’ll never know what they experienced when they set foot in Poland again, forty-five years after emigrating to the United States. I’ll never know what they thought once they returned to New York, or what they would have thought about the significance their trip and this film have since come to possess. But thanks to my aunt, I can now resolve one question that has long been a mystery to me. Although it turned up late in my search, this postcard allows me to document the start of my grandparents’ journey, information recorded nowhere else. David and Liza Kurtz sailed from Hoboken on the Holland-America liner Nieuw Amsterdam on a rainy Saturday afternoon, July 23, 1938, at 12:40 p.m., bound for Rotterdam. Now I know how the story begins.

*   *   *

I could also begin with my own journey, the moment I became interested in my grandparents’ trip. It’s a roundabout story that requires a brief detour into fiction.

In 2008, I was working on a novel set in Vienna, about two brothers, assimilated Jews, who escape from the city after the German invasion of Austria on March 12, 1938. I had lived in Vienna for several years in the 1980s, just after college, and I remained fascinated by the city and its history. On the seventieth anniversary of the Anschluss, I attended a lecture marking the occasion at the Austrian Cultural Forum in New York City.

The program that night featured a collection of amateur films documenting the German invasion, including a home movie by an anonymous cameraman that had been discovered recently in the Vienna flea market. By an extraordinary coincidence, this orphaned film contained unique footage of the harassment of Viennese Jews in the days following the Germans’ triumph...

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0374535795
• ISBN 13: 9780374535797
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 432