Three minutes in Poland : discovering a lost world in a 1938 family film

Tells the story of Glenn Kurtz's search for the annihilated Polish community captured in his grandfather's 1938 home movie. Traveling from the United States to 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 ( Nasielsk) 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. This book 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.