| Sumario: | Traveling in Europe in August 1938, one year before the outbreak of World War II, David Kurtz, the author’s grandfather, captured three minutes of ordinary life in a small, predominantly Jewish town in Poland. Of the three thousand Jews who lived there, fewer than one hundred would survive the Holocaust. David Kurtz’s film is the only moving imagery of this community prior to its destruction. Three Minutes in Poland traces Glenn Kurtz’s four-year journey to identify the people in his grandfather’s haunting images. The search takes him across the United States, to Canada, England, Poland and Israel, to archives, film preservation laboratories, and an abandoned Luftwaffe airfield. Ultimately, he encounters seven living survivors from this lost town, including two who appear in the film as children, a ninety-four-year-old woman, then barely eighteen, and an eighty-six-year-old man who appears in the film as a thirteen-year-old boy.Painstakingly assembled from interviews, photographs, documents, and artifacts, Three Minutes in Poland tells the rich, funny, harrowing, and surprisingly intertwined stories of these seven survivors and their Polish hometown. Originally a travel souvenir, David Kurtz’s home movie thus transforms from the fragmentary record of a town on the brink of catastrophe to a memorial to the individuals—to an entire vibrant culture—annihilated in the Holocaust, becoming finally the link that connects the scattered survivors, descendants, and local residents in a living community of remembrance. In this way, Three Minutes in Poland is a riveting testament to memory, loss, and improbable survival --
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