[00:04:36] Host: Humidity and film don't necessarily go together. [laughs]

[00:04:39] Glenn Kurtz: Exactly. Ultimately, I found a cardboard box, another terrible way to store old film, in a closet, and among films of my brother as a baby and my parents' wedding and some trips they'd taken, was this one film that smelled particularly badly of a trip that my grandparents had taken in 1938. Now, the film, when I found it, was in terrible condition my fears having been realized. It had basically shrunken and fused into this single hockey puck-like thing and it couldn't be viewed. My parents had had a lot of these films, not digitized, but copied to VHS in the 1980s. I found the VHS and I watched it. That was how I first watched the film.

The instant that I saw it, I knew that it was a historic value. The crazy thing was that, I guess I'd watched it as a kid, I had vague recollections of having seen it, and we talked about how grandma and grandpa had gone to Europe and gone to Poland, but somehow it had never sunk in to anyone until that moment in 2009 that this wasn't just vacation footage of grandma and grandpa, but actually documentation of a community that was about to be destroyed. They traveled in the summer of 1938. It was a grand tour. They hit all the major European capitals, but on the trip, they took this crazy side trip from the Netherlands across Germany to Poland and went to visit the town where my grandfather was born. Although I didn't know that when I saw the film.

[00:06:26] Host: That's something that any Eurocentric American would do, like go back and, "Oh, this is where our roots are from," right? It's just a--

[00:06:36] Glenn Kurtz: Exactly. It wasn't that uncommon. Sure, it wasn't something that everybody did in the 1930s, you had to have means,-

[00:06:43] Host: Sure.

[00:06:43] Glenn Kurtz: -but European travel was a very popular thing and there were tens of thousands of Americans crossing the ocean that summer. My grandparents were hardly alone. There were actually travel bureaus that specialized in what we would today call roots tours. People, typically American Jews, who were going back to visit the old country where their folks were from.

As it happened, my grandfather's mother was still alive. I think that may have been an impetus. She had been born in that town, and she was the one who had immigrated. They left when my grandfather was a baby, so he would have had no recollection of it. I think that some of the impetus for going was to go back and visit and take this film to show his mother of what the town looked like today.

[00:07:35] Host: Just for our understanding historically, what was the sociopolitical temperature of Europe at this point? We're a year out from the war beginning.

[00:07:51] Glenn Kurtz: Sure. It's a difficult question because as I often say, their 1938 is not our 1938. When we look back historically, we think, "Wow, the Munich crisis was building that summer," and in September, the Munich Conference would take place. My grandparents were back in New York by that time, but still, the tensions were building over the course of that summer.

Kristallnacht was going to happen in November of that same year. Obviously, that was something that would have made the news and then they would have been aware of. They crossed Germany. They changed trains in Berlin. A lot of people ask me, "What were they thinking going to Europe in 1938?" I think the answer was, "They weren't prophets. They didn't know what was going to happen." There are lots of tensions in the world today that tomorrow could break out into horrible wars that change history and we're sitting here having a nice podcast today.

[00:08:51] Host: Right. Yes, living our lives.

[00:08:53] Glenn Kurtz: Yes. There's no reason to assume that they would have been more sensitive to history than we are. Yes, lots and lots of people went to Europe to visit the capitals, and Germany was a very popular destination. Again, there were thousands and thousands of people who wanted to do a Rhine River Cruise in the summer of 1938.

[00:09:16] Host: Also, for historical context, we're only like 40 years out from the creation of motion film at this point. This is still a fairly new, especially for the personal use, and in that footage, especially that three minutes in Poland, you see how much of an anomaly it is to have this camera and have--

[00:09:44] Glenn Kurtz: Sure. Of course, in a small town in Poland, it would have been an extraordinary novelty because just consider economically, it was not the sort of thing that anyone was likely to have or have seen before. Again, if you look at Life Magazine or any of the national magazines that were big at that time, you'll likely see an ad for a Kodak Motion Picture camera. They were making a big push at that time to try and get people to take movies instead of just snapshots.

My grandfather-- They had introduced this particular model of camera in 1937, but it was not the first home movie camera. It was, however, a great innovation in that it was, in essence, an Instamatic. It was a very beautiful, elegant little machine. It's spring-loaded. You wind it up, never run out of battery. It was a cartridge. The film was preloaded into these cartridges. You flipped open the cover, you slapped the cartridge in, you closed the cover, and you were ready to shoot. It was really quite astonishing.

He was an early adopter of this. It wasn't inexpensive. I think at the time it cost about $75, which was a serious amount of money, but it was within the reach of middle-class people. He had the bottom-of-the-line version. It was unusual, but it's not probably as unusual as we think it's today.

The truly unusual part or the truly stunning part was that much of this film is in color, and Kodak had introduced color home movie 16-millimeter film. I believe that it had first been marketed in 1935 or 1936. It was a couple of years old at that point. My grandfather brought along a couple of cartridges of black and white and a couple of cartridges of color, so part of the film is in color.

[00:11:49] Host: There's a stunning moment of a young girl's red dress that just pops. It's really amazing to see and almost jarring going from the black and white to this pop of color. Now, you watched the home video. You had this kind of hockey puck of a deteriorating film and you knew that something special was captured on this.

[00:12:19] Glenn Kurtz: Yes. Literally, the instant I thought-- I got these chills because, again, their 1938 isn't our 1938, but since we know what 1938 would become, the instant I saw these people, I thought, "Oh my God, they're going to be killed soon. They're in such mortal danger and they don't know it, but I know it." I had this illogical urge to scream at them and to tell them to run and to try and warn them.

[00:12:52] Host: Well, and like we said, your grandparents, Americans, with a camera in this small Polish town was a novelty and it drew out children. I think that is one of the hardest things to take, is that you're watching these happy children who are no different than any children today playing and pushing and making faces and mugging for the camera, and knowing what was going to happen. That hit hard.

[00:13:32] Glenn Kurtz: I think that that-- you've put your finger exactly on what makes this so profoundly moving to watch and profoundly important historically. It's so moving to watch because the kids are just having fun, and there's so many of them. Like you say, they're shoving and making faces and doing things that kids do, and it's charming to watch. There's nothing about the film that's violent or dangerous or in any way unpleasant.

On the contrary, it's perfectly banal and charming. On the one hand, that's what's so moving to us to watch because we know what's going to happen. Also, at the same time, historically, I think because of what happened and because of what we know will happen, when we think of Polish Jews or a small town in Poland in the late 1930s, what we picture is actually death camps. We picture what will happen to them. We don't picture them having their lives.

[00:14:36] Host: The life before--

[00:14:36] Glenn Kurtz: We don't picture them playing on the street and pushing each other and having fun. That's a terrible loss. For their deaths actually to have meaning, I think, we have to recognize that those deaths were the end of lives. That was really the motivation for me to start to investigate what we were looking at in the film.

[00:15:01] Host: I want to clarify too. I don't think we've mentioned this. The town is Nasielsk. I want to talk about how you discovered that, but tell us about the population. This is where the weight of what this film carries. Tell us about the population of Nasielsk in 1938.

[00:15:24] Glenn Kurtz: Sure. This was the town where my grandfather was born. It was a small town, although the people from there called it a city, had a total population of about 7,000 or 7,500. It's a small mercantile town surrounded by farmland. It's about 35 miles north of Warsaw. There was a big rail line right outside town. If we use the word shtetl, we tend to picture a farming village from the 18th century or early 19th century. This was not that. It was surrounded by farms, but it was a mercantile town.

There were approximately 3000 Jews. Almost half of the population in 1938 was Jewish in this town. That had been the case with varying percentages, but approximately half the town for hundreds of years, for at least 200 or 300 and possibly 400 years. It was a well-established community that had lived in this mixed town for generation after generation. Because of the proximity to the capitol and this rail line, it was perhaps a slightly more commercial town than you would find farther out in the countryside.

There were lots of people who would go back and forth to the capital and buy wares to sell back in town or to sell their wares in town. There was a fair amount of back and forth. There was actually a man who ran a regular bus service back and forth. There was a large button factory owned by a Jewish family in this town, which exported not just throughout Poland but throughout Europe and to the United States making high-quality mother-of-pearl buttons among other things, also with bakelite, at that time a very advanced process.

There were a couple of cars. People had a couple of cars. There were some delivery men who had trucks, not just horses and wagons. Like any Jewish town of any size, there would be the whole panoply of political commitments from Zionists to anti-Zionists and, of course, very dedicated religious Hasidim and every imaginable variation in between.

There were not one, but two amateur theater companies. They performed, among other things, The Dybbuk. Again, this was not a town out of touch with the world. It was a town that was, I say, on the cusp of modernity. It would be, in some ways, recognizable to us to walk in there. They listened to the radio. They listened to broadcasts on the BBC and had dance parties when they would broadcast big band music. It was a vibrant but economically depressed, as most Polish towns were at the time, little community.

[00:18:30] Host: Tell us a little bit about your detective work in discovering the location. You never met your grandfather and your grandmother never talked about this trip. You had to do the legwork to figure out where this was in Poland.

[00:18:48] Glenn Kurtz: Yes, that was a challenge. Every part of this project was really challenging. The funny thing about film or photographs is they're so specific. They always show a particular place at a particular moment, particular people, but unless you know what you're looking at, you have no idea what you're looking at. It suddenly becomes wildly generic. It becomes people in a marketplace in a town in Poland.

When I first saw this, I had no idea where it was. As you mentioned, I never met my grandfather and my grandmother didn't convey a lot of information about her past to us as grandchildren. I saw it very much out of context. Of course, the first thing I did was I asked my father, I asked my aunts, "What does it show?" They said that it was my grandmother's hometown, and it took me six months to find a survivor from my grandmother's hometown and show him the film. Within a second he said, "I've never seen this place before in my life." That left me at something of a dead end.

That was the characteristic position I found myself in throughout all of this research, was coming up at dead ends. How do you go from faces in an image to names? How do you go from just generic street scenes to a place? I was unable to-- I guessed at that point, "Well, if it's not my grandmother's hometown, why else would they go? Maybe it's my grandfather's hometown." We knew the name of that town but I wasn't successful in finding a survivor who could watch the film and tell me anything about it.

I had a background as a researcher. I went to libraries and archives and searched and searched and ultimately, it took more than a year but I ultimately found a photograph in an archive in Israel that showed the synagogue doors in this town where my grandfather was born. It happens that in the film you see these same doors, and there's a feature, there's a carved lion, a lion of Judah which you see on the door and it's exactly the same in the photograph and in the film.

That was what allowed me to confirm with documentation that this was my grandfather's town. That was the first big break. Once you have the name of the town, you can learn more specific things about its history, how many people live there and you can start to learn names of people who live there. I found the business directory, hundreds of names of the merchants who lived in town. I collected a great deal of information on paper and then I faced, once again, the dead end of, well, how do you connect the paper to the images in the film?

[00:21:35] Host: You could just guess but that's not-- yes.

[00:21:38] Glenn Kurtz: Yes, I was unsuccessful and I worked on that for two and a half years. I gathered a fair amount of information but at some point, I just reached this fundamental dead end. I can't leap from names on a page to faces in a film. So I thought I found the film too late. I actually was at the point of giving up. I just thought, "I have this magnificent piece of evidence of pre-war Jewish life. It shows particular people and my grandmother's in the film and they're interacting with people. There must be people that they talked with and knew. there must be names. There must be something, and I'll never find out what it is." It was so stressful.

[00:22:17] Host: It could have just been that, it could have just been capturing this moment, it could have been this artifact, this representative, this memorial for these nameless people who suffered a horrific fate, and that would've been a powerful thing.

[00:22:37] Glenn Kurtz: I thought so as well. It is intensely powerful, and in some sense it also tells the story that the Holocaust tells which is as one of just fundamental loss, we'll never know. Here we have this momentary glimpse at this community, at these people, these children, and it doesn't-- as I said, the first instance I saw it, you feel this tremendous sense of loss and longing to help them or to know who they are, to know what happened to them and at that moment, I thought, "Well, that's what this film conveys." It is, as you said, a memorial and it's a memorial precisely because it captures that intense longing and tragedy of wanting to know and being unable to know. I think that in itself is, yes, as you say, a very powerful message. As it happened, of course, it turned out differently.

[00:23:39] Host: Right. Tell us about Maurice Chandler.

[00:23:42] Glenn Kurtz: At that moment when I was really just about to give up and I had written an essay, which said more or less what I just said, that this is a magnificent piece of documentation and we'll never know what it documents. Then out of the blue, I got an email from someone I didn't know, a woman in Detroit. I had donated the original hockey puck film to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. and they had spent months and months, they sent it to a restoration lab, and they'd spent months and months to try and soften up this little chunk in plastic and unspool the film, and then to digitize every single frame and then reprint it in essence on archival grade stock. Ultimately, it was possible to view the original film although not as it were original-original.

They had digitized it and put it up on their website, the Holocaust Museum, and this woman had seen it online. As in one of those scenes where my grandfather is panning the camera across the market square, and all these kids are shoving each other and trying to get their faces in the frame, one boy succeeded and that was her grandfather. In the instant she thought, she screamed, "That's grandpa." He's a 13-year-old boy in this town where he was born and grew up and he's still alive. He was 86 years old, I guess, then and he's 99 now.

[00:25:27] Host: Wow.

[00:25:28] Glenn Kurtz: They spent a frantic day trying to get in touch with him. "You have to watch this film. You have to watch this film." Finally, he came home and he put it on. I'd been in touch with the woman. She'd written me this email like, "Oh my God, you have no idea this gift you've given to our family." I wrote back and called her immediately and said, "You have no idea what a gift you've given me because I've been searching for two and a half years for anyone who can help me understand this film." We had this ecstatic phone call. Then I called her grandfather and talked to him literally moments after he'd first watched the film.

The first thing he said to me was, "You've given me back my childhood." This man was the sole survivor. He lost his whole family, his two brothers, his parents, his aunts and uncles, his cousins, all his friends, and the trauma of the war itself. Then I think the secondary trauma, which we often don't really discuss as much, which is the trauma of suddenly finding yourself alone in the world at the end of the war and having to-- he's 22 years old, he's a kid still.

What does he do in his life? Where does he go? Who is he anymore? To have to confront that and to remake a life for himself, I think those two traumas had so shaped him that everything that came before had this fairytale quality to it. Didn't even seem to him that it was real. Yet here's the film, and there he is standing with friends, people that he knew. It happens that this gentleman, Mr. Chandler, he was born Moszek Tuchendler, and subsequently changed his name in the United States, he has a photographic memory.

If I was going to find one person to help me understand the film that my grandparents had made, then he's the guide because he was able to watch it to remember names and dates and tell stories about people, not only people who appear in the film but also others who were important to the town or important to his family and, of course, stories about his family. Well, that was in 2012 that I first met him and now it's 2024 and I talk to him a lot and I still learn things from him every time we talk.

It's just astonishing how deep and precise and rich his memory is. Yes, we met in January of 2012, and that began many years of really close collaboration. I think it took a while for him to believe that I really cared and, of course, here's this stranger who wats into his life and like, 'Hi, tell me everything that's had to be horrible that happened to you, and all of the most painful memories that you have." It took a while for us to build the kind of trust and rapport where he was really willing to share with me what he remembered but we did, and that became the center of the book that I wrote.

[00:29:03] Host: There are also threads of other connections that that relationship led to, to where this three minutes finally had that little bit of life that you were looking for. You said like 4%, something like that, estimated of what is in this three minutes has been identified of the people?

[00:29:28] Glenn Kurtz: Yes. There are more than 150 people who appear in the film. I say we've identified 20 or 25 but even that, what does it mean to identify someone? Does that mean we know their first name, their last name, and their family connections? Can we place them in the documents in such a way that we can follow their history in whatever way is possible? That happens for very, very few people. There's a couple that we can identify with that kind of bureaucratic clarity.

There are other people where he looked at this one guy, and his name was Bortz or at least that was the nickname that they gave him. Bortz. That was what everybody called him. Everybody in town had a nickname. That was what he remembered. He's identified. I know who he was to Mr. Chandler. They weren't friends. This guy was considerably older. He was just a workman who did odd jobs around town. We know this about him, we know something about him, but it's not an identification that carries farther than just that initial context of who he was to the other people in the town.

It doesn't reflect who he was, for example, to the government or to any of the record-keeping organizations or institutions that might have helped us place him more fully in the bureaucratic, institutional context of a state, of a history, of a life in that way. He's identified but it's an identification that's of a different quality than Mr. Chandler who's clearly also been identified and we have now a lot of information about his life.

[00:31:22] Host: Full and rich. It's interesting with this concept of micro-history of being able to create a rounded, rich storytelling to these images on this film. I think about today with how much we're able to document, everybody has their own personal device. We're constantly taking pictures and photos. I think that that's something that we are all experiencing. Because we're using these devices and social media to document moments in time with our family, with our friends, with ourselves, and our selfies to say, "I am here, I exist and maybe whatever I'm documenting right now will let me exist after I'm gone."

[00:32:18] Glenn Kurtz: Yes. I wonder. Let me first address the question of micro-history because that's something that's really important to me. When I found this, I could have tried, and at first, I flirted with the thought, "Well, maybe I should tell a history of this town and the Holocaust in a more typical and generalized sense that's typical of big-scale history." I didn't want to do that. I'm not a Holocaust historian. I'm not a historian at all by profession. I didn't feel that I could really contribute meaningfully in the way and that other people could do that kind of story much better than I.

I did have this film which was unique and no one was ever going to tell the history of these totally ordinary people. I felt really profoundly that because the film had documented individuals who were real people, that that was the story I had to try and tell. If I was unable to tell it, then that was the story also that the lives of ordinary people, insofar as they are passed down at all, those are important. If the Holocaust was anything, it was an event that happened to ordinary people.

I solved the problem for myself, just the narrative problem of what kind of story is this by focusing as narrowly as I possibly could. What's this person's name? What are they wearing? Why are they wearing that? What did they do? Who were their friends? What was their family life like? What's the most quotidian information that it's possible to gather about an ordinary person? That's an almost impossible challenge for most people.

Now to flash forward to what you said about us taking all of our selfies and vast amount of documentation, I think exactly the same thing's going to happen to all of that has happened to this film, which is to say 99.999% of the context that made the image meaningful in the instant that it was taken will fall away. We probably don't even remember ourselves, the names of half the people in the selfies we took, whatever, 5 or 10 years ago. You look at it like, "Where were we? When was that?"

Okay, even if there's metadata on your photo or whatever that tells you where and when you took it, still it's like, "Why was I-- who was there?" All of that that made it part of your life falls away. Not all of it, just most of it. I think that is no different in a sense from this film. The film, obviously, the importance of the film historically is vastly intensified because of what happened and because of the fate that hung over this community and each of these individuals. So anything that we can preserve of their lives is meaningful now because the whole purpose of the genocide was to erase them and erase their existence and everything about them. Anything that we can preserve about them acts against the intent of that genocide and is therefore worthwhile and meaningful.

That's maybe not the case for us in our selfies, I hope. Let us hope that that's not and will never be the case for us in our selfies, but even within the personal context of our lives. When your kids look at your phone or if they're even able to access any of those photos in whatever, 40, 50, 60, 70 years, they're not going to have any idea what they're looking at. Maybe they'll recognize you, maybe. They're probably not going to recognize most of the other people who are important to you who were the reason why you took these images in the first place. Most of that's just going to disappear.

[00:36:26] Host: We'd like to thank Glenn Kurtz for his time, his expertise, and his passion. Medium History is produced by Past Forward with support from Chapman University and Dr. Stephanie Takaragawa. For more socially conscious content, visit pastforward.com or follow us on Apple, Spotify or wherever you podcast.

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