Three Minutes In Poland: Discovering A Lost World In A 1938 Family Film

"At the center of this beautiful book is three minutes of film footage showing 1938 Nasielsk, a tiny Polish town, from a home movie that Glenn Kurtz found in his grandparents’ closet. There are delighted children, people jumping and waving — just a few moments of normalcy in a town that, a year later, would be devastated when the Nazis marched into Poland. When a young woman recognizes her grandfather Moszek Tuchendler, now Maurice Chandler, as a grinning teenager in footage Kurtz posts online, he begins to reconstruct a vanished world. A combination of luck and hard work reveals the harrowing story of some of the Polish Jews in the town — a community of 3,000, of whom fewer than 100 people survived. It’s an unusual Holocaust tale — a reconstruction of the moment just before the shadow that fell on Europe, and it reminds us that the horror wasn’t just the violence itself, but the loss of a vibrant, joyful, bustling life."