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

On a European vacation with friends in August 1938, one year before the outbreak of World War II, David Kurtz, the author’s grandfather, captured three minutes on 16 mm Kodachrome color film of ordinary life in a small, predominantly Jewish town in Poland. Originally a family travel souvenir, his home movie became the sole remaining record of a vibrant town on the brink of catastrophe.

In this lecture, Glenn Kurtz traces his four years of tenacious research to identify the people in his grandfather’s film. His search took him across the United States, to Canada, England, Poland and Israel. Ultimately, he discovered seven living survivors of the town, including an 86-year-old man who appears in the film as a 13-year-old boy.

A 2016 Guggenheim Foundation Fellow, Glenn Kurtz graduated from Tufts University and the New England Conservatory of Music and holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University

Books available for purchase. Book signing will follow the lecture.