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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.
- Sales Rank: #307090 in Books
- Published on: 2014-11-18
- Released on: 2014-11-18
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.28" h x 1.37" w x 6.30" l, 1.00 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 432 pages
Review
“Kurtz's quest to learn about the lost world depicted in his grandfather's home movie is at the heart of this deeply moving, gorgeously written book.” ―Kate Tuttle, The Boston Globe
“[An] expansive, beautifully rendered micro-history. . . In the pages of Glenn Kurtz's marvelous book, the ghosts from those three minutes are breathtakingly brought to life.” ―Louise Steinman, Los Angeles Times
“An impressive feat of historical research . . . In a genre so often preoccupied with the recitation of horrors, Three Minutes in Poland is the rare work that seems more about people than about ghosts.” ―Sarah Kaplan, The Washington Post
“In this captivating book, Mr. Kurtz tries to reconstruct Jewish Nasielsk, knowing he will fail--not only because he arrives too late but because memory is by nature incomplete.” ―Dara Horn, The Wall Street Journal
“Three Minutes in Poland--along with the remarkable four-year quest it documents--is an act of reverence, as well as a feat of archival reconstruction. Kurtz's patience, energy and appetite for detail seem boundless, and they gradually bring a community--a microcosm of Polish Jewry, with all its political and religious factions and class divisions--(almost) to life . . . The book accumulates elegiac power . . . Three Minutes in Poland describes with horrifying precision the ordeals that preceded the murders of most of Nasielsk's Jewish community. But equally compelling pages document how Chandler, with guile, luck and some Polish help, escapes the Warsaw ghetto, took a non-Jewish Polish identity and managed to survive.” ―Julia Klein, The Chicago Tribune
“Kurtz weaves . . . a haunting web of contingency” ―The New Yorker
“Kurtz's tenacious research and sensitive reporting make this book a gem.” ―The Christian Science Monitor, The 10 best books of November
“Engrossing, exhaustively researched.” ―Jessica Zack, San Francisco Chronicle
“A rare glimpse of a lost world.” ―Moment magazine
“A pilgrimage of the highest order.” ―Elaine Margolin, Jewish Journal
“Three Minutes in Poland begins as the story of an old family film rediscovered and veers into an important tale of Polish shtetls during World War II. It is intensely moving and brilliantly researched, and it reads like a thriller.” ―Elie Wiesel, author of Night
“A masterpiece. With scrupulous intelligence and deep compassion, Glenn Kurtz tells this stupendous, terrifying, and ultimately consoling story in a way that fully honors the material. The reader grieves for what was lost, but is also alert to the miracle that anything was saved at all. Kurtz has done us all a great service in rescuing this tale from oblivion. Three Minutes In Poland is destined to be a classic.” ―Teju Cole, author of Open City
“Glenn Kurtz's beautifully written book is many things at once: a family memoir, a page-turning mystery, a penetrating look at one of the darkest chapters in human history. Above all, it's a powerful testament to the singular worth of every life. That's the passion that inspired Kurtz through his years of research, and I can't think of a worthier one.” ―Rebecca Goldstein, author of Mazel
“Glenn Kurtz leads the reader on an inspiring journey through the forgotten past in this meticulous work of historical reconstruction. I was amazed by the patient, forensic skill with which he followed the trail of a handful of images into a vibrant array of voices and visual memories. By helping his many interview subjects remember details of a world they themselves didn't know they still carried inside, Kurtz discovers life where there had seemed only to be loss.” ―George Prochnik, author of The Impossible Exile
“With nothing more to go on than three scant minutes in a family film, Glenn Kurtz has meticulously pieced together a luminous, searing story of a place and its people. I read this beautiful book wishing for nothing less than to turn back the clock and change the course of history. Kurtz is a restrained and elegant writer, and Three Minutes in Poland is not only a magnificent literary achievement, but a human one.” ―Dani Shapiro, author of Devotion
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.
Most helpful customer reviews
24 of 28 people found the following review helpful.
Film and faces from a destroyed past...
By Jill Meyer
In summer of 1938, Liza and David Kurtz and three companions took a trip to Europe from their home in the United States. They toured central Europe and several of the places they visited were in Poland. Both had emigrated from small villages in Poland years before - David from Nasielsk and Liza from Berezne. While traveling, David Kurtz took film of their various stops, including three minutes in one of the Polish villages they visited. This film, along with other family photos and albums followed them into retirement, until it was uncovered at the Kurtz's son's house. The film was not in very good condition but was able to be restored by technicians. And what a find this film turned out to be. The Kurtz's grandson - Glenn Kurtz - has written a book, "Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film" which explains how these lost images - once identified - opened up a world thought destroyed by the Nazis in the early 1940's.
Glenn Kurtz is a member of what I call the "Second Generation"; they are the grandchildren of those who survived the Holocaust. MY generation is the "First Generation" and our stories have been told for the past 40 years of living with parents who went through hell in Europe. Now our children are searching and questioning and writing their books. (Another excellent "Second Generation" book is "Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind" by Sarah Wildman.)
As the Kurtzes had been dead for many years, it was left for their daughter, Shirley, and their grandchildren to identify the place and people in the film. The three minutes of film of the Kurtzes returning to a village was misidentified at first as Liza Kurtz's home village of Berezne. Further examination correctly identified the village as Nasielsk. With help from various Holocaust museums and, of course, the internet, several people and places in the film were identified and Glenn Kurtz set out to speak to these survivors, some 70 years after the filming. Several were still living, though quite old, and they were surprised to see pictures of themselves and their families and friends from 1938. Memories were stoked and stories were told of this time before Europe fell apart and most of the people in the film were murdered. Stories told by survivors led to other people from Nasielsk and their children being identified as still alive. Kurtz also writes about his visit to the current-day village of Nasielsk, where the Jews of the past were just that, of the past.
Was it chance or luck that a few of the people in Nasielsk, Poland shown in the film gleefully greeting their visitors from the United States in 1938 survived the mass killings and deportations to Treblinka and Auschwitz? Did those people - both living in Poland and visiting - have any idea that slightly a year after these pictures were taken that the lives of those remaining in Poland would be torn apart? Very few people can predict the future and often what is predicted is considered outlandish and impossible. The villagers of Nasielsk - some who had left for Palestine and to other safe havens - could not have envisioned the wholesale slaughter of the Jews of Europe.
Glenn Kurtz has written an excellent look at a doomed Polish village. It is both an interesting and horrifying look at the past. At what once was and those people who made it what it was.
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful.
Highly recommended
By Jo Ann
Great book! Glenn Kurtz takes us through the steps he took to learn about the Polish community captured in a vacation film taken by his grandparents in 1938. I was immediately engrossed in his journey and awed that he so skillfully brings together his findings. I came away with a sense of place and time – the normalcy of a community and how that changed so horribly with the Holocaust. I hope Kurtz writes a sequel as more families find him and share their stories.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
Meditation on a Lost World
By Yours Truly
The three minutes of Polish village film footage that Glenn Kurtz finds in his parents' Florida home provide a framework for a thoughtful investigation of and meditation on the fate of the roughly 3000 Jewish villagers expelled from it during the Holocaust. The cinematographer is Kurtz's paternal grandfather, David, who in 1938 added the village of Nasielsk to a tour of several European capitals with his wife and friends. Glenn Kurtz never met him, so the film's characters and the context of the visit are a puzzle that this memoir beautifully explores.
Once a version of the film is posted on the U.S. Holocaust Museum's website, 87 year-old Morry Chandler, now of Michigan and Florida, becomes a pivotal character in the drama that unfolds. Chandler's daughter recognizes him in the street filmed by David Kurtz. A teenager when the Germans invaded Poland, Chandler used his strengths of body and mind to escape more than once and eventually pass as a Catholic farmworker until the end of the war. He becomes Glenn Kurtz's guide to the village.
The author of a previous memoir about playing classical guitar, Kurtz brings together the individual stories of less than a dozen survivors and the life they remember. What might in another author's hands have become a clumsy collection is woven into a single narrative history, a memorial and a contemporary work of art.
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