ARTS&LIFE FILM
LEFT: This photo shows what became of the Chandler family home and textile business. It came to house a 21st-century restaurant. BELOW: Evelyn Rosen, Maurice Chandler and Dorris Chandler
Slice of Life — and More
3-minute vacation film snippet of small-town Jews in pre-Nazi Poland yields a touching, revealing movie.
SUZANNE CHESSLER CONTRIBUTING WRITER
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JANUARY 20 • 2022
one of the youngsters in the snippet noticed on the web by his granddaughter, Marcy Rosen of Bloomfield Hills, who recalled early family photos as she recognized her grandfather. Her observation led to vital resources for identifying the people shown so their stories could be told. Glenn Kurtz of New York found the film — made by his late grandfather, David Kurtz — in the 2009 Florida home of his parents. The clip Glenn Kurtz was donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and put online as only one of the pathways Kurtz ultimately used
FRANZISKA LIEPE
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hat briefly was filmed in 1938 to remember vacation travels in Poland came to circulate across the web, motivated a book and recently was expanded into a 69-minute movie to be shown virtually this month by the Sundance Film Festival. The expressive milestones resulted from happenstance discoveries followed by determined research and connected families descended from residents of a small town, Nasielsk, where the three-minute clip of townspeople was filmed a year before Nazis decimated the town’s Jewish population. Maurice Chandler, 97, who divides his time between Michigan and Florida, was
to find the material written into Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film, published in 2014 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Bianca Stigter, a Netherlands historian and cultural critic, also caught sight of the brief film while roaming the web, and she became intrigued with the title and fascinated by the lively images. She went on to direct the narration of closeups and montages for Three Bianca Minutes — A Lengthening, Stigter which has been spotlighted in festivals on its way to theaters. “One of the things that’s been so profound for me about this whole story is something I never imagined would happen, and that is the relationships that developed as a result of it and the connections with people,” said Kurtz, who remains close to the Chandler family and other Nasielsk families, organized descendent travel to the town and keeps attending film festivals to observe the emotional reactions of audiences to the Stigter movie. “I think Bianca approached the film in a spirit very similar to the one I felt in my book,” he said. “The main questions were who are these people and what happened to them as individuals even if it’s not possible in the end to gather all the information.” Kurtz, who teaches at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York
