Genealogy: Recovering Lost Souls

Found footage reveals 3 poignant minutes in prewar Poland

By Jessica Zach    Nov. 14, 2014      from SF Chronicle

When Glenn Kurtz discovered a dusty VHS tape of his grandparents’ 1930s vacation movies tucked away in a closet of his parents’ Florida home six years ago, he thought he had stumbled upon a minor family memento. Maybe the amateur travelogue — labeled “Our Trip to Holland Belgium Poland Switzerland France” — would shed light on Kurtz’s paternal grandfather, a Jewish immigrant from Poland, who had died before Kurtz was born.

“It was just Grandma and Grandpa’s vacation to Europe, and no one considered that it might have real historical value,” says Kurtz.

His engrossing, exhaustively researched new book “Three Minutes in Poland” charts the consuming four-year journey of genealogical sleuthing that Kurtz embarked on, triggered by just a few minutes of that grainy 70-year-old footage (transferred years earlier from 16mm film).

Tucked in between the Kurtzes’ sojourns in Brussels and the Swiss Alps were three minutes, shot in both black-and-white and — surprisingly for its time — color, of their August 1938 visit to Kurtz’s grandfather’s hometown of Nasielsk, Poland.

An everyday small-town street scene comes to life: Children goof for the camera; bearded old men and women in kerchiefs cluster in doorways, keen to glimpse the prosperous American tourists with the newfangled Kodachrome movie camera, “the iPhone of its day.”

“I got shivers the moment these scenes appeared. Everything else faded away,” Kurtz, 52, said by phone from New York where he moved in 2006 after 20 years in the Bay Area.

A classical guitarist turned writing professor, Kurtz is also the author of the well-received 2007 book “Practicing: A Musician’s Return to Music.” He earned his doctorate from Stanford in 1994 in German studies and comparative literature.

“Those shtetl faces broke the frame,” he says. “I realized I wasn’t looking at a family vacation anymore. I suddenly saw this as a unique record of a place that probably had no other extant documentation. It was evidence of a world that would soon cease to exist.”

Neither the American visitors nor the Polish townspeople going about their summer day had any inkling of the catastrophe looming on the horizon in Europe.

Kristallnacht (the “Night of Broken Glass”), the Nazi-coordinated pogrom against the Jews, would take place in Germany and Austria just three months after David and Liza Kurtz sailed back home to Flatbush, Brooklyn, on the Queen Mary.

Germany invaded Poland, beginning World War II, one year later on Sep 1, 1939, and the persecution of Nasielsk’s Jews began immediately. On Dec. 3, the town’s entire Jewish population was deported in boxcars, many bound for Treblinka.

Community lost

Of Nasielsk’s approximately 3,000 Jews when the Kurtzes visited, fewer than 100 survived the war.

“I wanted to reach inside the frame and shake these people, scream to them, 'Get up! Run! Flee!’” Kurtz writes.

Instead, Kurtz did everything in his power to fill in the identities and unknown fates of those nameless faces.

Part memoir and part history lesson as taught by a dogged and emotionally invested researcher, 'Three Minutes” chronicles the chain of coincidences after Kurtz donated the original, and badly deteriorating, film to the Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archive at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. The museum made it available online.

“Glenn is very lucky he got his film to us when he did because I don’t think it would have been much longer until it was completely disintegrated,” says Leslie Swift, the Holocaust Museum’s chief of film, oral history and recorded sound.

Swift and Kurtz will speak together in San Francisco on Monday, Nov. 17.

After 18 months combing through the JewishGen and Shoah Foundation databases and oral histories, Kurtz thought he had “gone as far as possible” with identifying his grandparents’ film.

Family research

And then he got an e-mail from Marcy Rosen, a lawyer in Detroit, who found the Kurtz family film online when researching her grandfather Maurice Chandler (formerly Moszek Tuchendler), a Holocaust survivor.

Rosen immediately recognized the exuberant, round-faced 13-year-old in the footage as Chandler, still alive and well at 86 in Boca Raton, Fla.

Kurtz calls Chandler “the Rosetta Stone. He made the film legible.”

The day the two men met was “the break in the case.”

Kurtz decided immediately to scrap the novel he had been working on and take leave from teaching at NYU to devote himself full time to identifying people in the Nasielsk footage.

Like many Holocaust survivors, “Mr. Chandler didn’t tell his family much about what he’d endured,” says Kurtz. The sole member of his family to survive the war, “he was a kind of Adam figure to them, seeming as if he had come from nowhere. He had nothing to show, not one photograph. It was such an extraordinary moment when he said to me: 'Now I can show my family that I didn’t come from Mars.’”

Chandler’s flood of memories led Kurtz to “find eight other Nasielsk survivors, all of whom had fled to Soviet-occupied Poland during the war.”

Kurtz eventually identified dozens more people through interviewing descendants on research trips to England, Canada, Poland and Israel.

In October Kurtz led a Kickstarter-funded trip of 50 people to Nasielsk, including numerous people with family roots there. He hopes to turn the trip into a documentary.

Kurtz says he has never felt very religious, but “does feel connected to a Jewish disposition, if there is such a thing culturally. There is a kind of Talmudic quality to the research I did, going over these documents again and again to learn what secrets they might still contain.”

He doesn’t have an easy answer for why this old snippet of film took hold of him with such intensity.

“I felt an urgency because time is running out. I kept thinking it’s still possible that people are alive to whom I can show these images and give something of their lives back to them. That’s a tremendous gift to be able to give someone.”

Individual lives

Swift says the Holocaust Museum “considers collecting this kind of footage of prewar Jewish life in Europe to be of paramount importance. People might think the museum’s archive is just about Hitler, but in fact it is foremost about the victims’ perspective and what happened to various real individuals.”

The film’s ordinariness is in fact “integral to its historical value,” she says. “It’s the same kind of film that today we shoot all the time of our kids. It is just everyday life and nothing special — that is, until you know what happens just afterwards.”

Jessica Zack is a freelance writer.

Rescuing the Evidence: Three Minutes in Poland: The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum presents a free presentation with archival film clips by Glenn Kurtz and Leslie Swift. 7 p.m. Monday, Nov. 17. The Jewish Community Library,1835 Ellis St., S.F. (310) 556-3222. western@ushmm.org.