(Jewish Group) Lost for decades, 3 minutes of pre-Holocaust life becomes a full-length documentary

[Behind the Aegis]

Out on August 19, a new film, ‘Three Minutes – A Lengthening,’ by Dutch filmmaker Bianca Stigter, looks in depth at recovered footage of a Polish town prior to its devastation

In 1938, David Kurtz, a Polish-born Jew who came to the United States as a child, took his wife on a “grand tour” of Europe. A successful businessman, he brought along with him a brand new movie camera.

In between typical stops like Paris and Rome, he visited Nasielsk, the small village where he had grown up. Nasielsk had a significant Jewish population (over 40 percent of the town) and a thriving community. The day he visited, people were out in full force, eager to show off due to the novelty of the camera.

Kurtz shot a little over three minutes of footage, trying to capture the buildings of his youth, but the people — fortunately, in retrospect — kept getting in his way. Then he packed up and went to his next destination. The film lingered in storage for decades, untouched.

What Kurtz never realized was that he captured one of the last moments of vibrant Jewish life in this part of the world. Months later, all of Nasielsk’s Jews were rounded up, sent to ghettoes and, eventually, extermination camps. Very few survived the war.

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