Glenn Kurtz: Three Minutes in Poland Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film:

Five years ago, Glenn Kurtz discovered three minutes of color footage film
shot by his grandfather on a 1938 trip to the Polish village of Nasielsk. Glenn’s
grandfather inadvertently captured a world that ceased to exist just one year
later. Of Nasielsk’s approximately 3,000 Jews, fewer than 100 survived the war.

When Glenn showed the footage to an archivist at the United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum (UHSMM), he soon realized what a rare find he
had made. What he thought was just a family memento turned out to be the
only known footage of Nasielsk before its annihilation. Three Minutes in
Poland chronicles Kurtz’s search for Nasielsk’s lost history,
and for the identities of those captured on film. After many dead ends, a
woman watching a video on the UHSMM website identifies her grandfather,
then a thirteen year old boy, whose memory helps Glenn unlock the contents
of the film in a remarkably vivid and moving way.

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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. Glenn holds a PhD from
Stanford University.