On 4 August, 1938, David Kurtz, who had emigrated to America in the 1890s, used his recently-purchased Cine-Kodak Magazine 16mm camera to film in the Jewish quarter of Nasielsk, the Polish town where he was born.
He was unaware that he was capturing some of the last images of a community that, in a little over a year’s time, would be rounded up by the Nazis, deported to ghettos, and ultimately murdered at Treblinka. A mere 100 of Nasielsk’s 3,000 Jews survived the Holocaust.
Eight decades after it was shot, Kurtz’s haunting footage is the subject of a unique documentary, Three Minutes — A Lengthening, written and directed by Bianca Stigter, a respected Dutch author, cultural journalist and critic, and wife of the acclaimed British filmmaker Steve McQueen.
That the material had survived was a small miracle. When Kurtz’s grandson, Glenn Kurtz, recovered it from a closet at his parents’ home in Florida, it had fused into a single mass.
He donated it to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, which immediately sent it to a colour lab for restoration. He was lucky: in the same way that there has been a race against time to collect survivor testimonies, the fragile physical nature of the material meant that time was of the essence here, too. If he had found it a month later, the film would have been beyond repair.
Stigter learned of the footage’s existence in 2014, when Glenn wrote a Facebook post publicising his book, Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film. He said anyone who wanted to watch the film could do so at the USHMM website.
“I looked at it, and was immediately very into it. It intrigued me, especially because it was in colour, which is very rare for images from that time and place,” says Stigter.
Children smile, laugh and mug as they crowd before Kurtz’s lens, cheerfully jostling each other for a place in the frame. “You really get the feeling that they’re looking right at you,” says Stigter. In locations that later played a harrowing role in the final hours and minutes of the Jewish presence in Nasielsk, people stream out of a synagogue, and casually walk across a cobbled square lined with linden trees.
The film is spontaneous and artless, suggesting Kurtz had just “pressed a button”, says Stigter. She was fascinated by its “time-machine quality” and by seeing something “that was supposed to be erased completely by the Nazis. [The images] have a home-movie ordinariness. But, because of what happened a year later, they become very extraordinary.”
At just three-and-a-bit minutes, the film left her wanting more. “I immediately felt, ‘Oh, wouldn’t it be great if you could spend some more time with these people, extend this footage in some way, to keep it in our presence a bit longer.’”
Stigter was not then a filmmaker, “so I didn’t do anything with this thought”, she says. A few weeks later, the Critics’ Choice section of the International Film Festival Rotterdam invited her to make a video essay, and she approached Glenn to ask for his permission to use the footage.
He was unsure at first, she admits, because “one of his fears, I think, was that it would be treated very generically. But when he found out that I wanted the opposite, that I wanted to find out as much information [as possible] and treat the people we see as much as individuals as we can, we were on the same wavelength.”
After making the 2015 short film Three Minutes Thirteen Minutes Thirty Minutes, she still felt there was more to discover, and sought out a producer to help her expand it. “And then we worked on it for five years more,” she says, laughing.
Three Minutes — A Lengthening begins with Kurtz’s footage played in full, and then examines it exhaustively, zooming in and out, reversing it, reframing it, speeding it up, slowing it down, and pulling out specific details in order to make what we are seeing feel richer and more present.
Most important are the faces that repeatedly command our attention. But whose are they? Of the 153 individuals Stigter lifted from the footage to create a moving memorial that fills the screen, just 11 have been named so far.
Initially, the specialist she asked to isolate the faces returned with only 40, thinking some were too fuzzy for her to use. “I said, ‘That doesn’t matter to me. Everybody we can recognise as a person should be in it.’ It might be the last trace that is visible of someone,” she explains now. “So I wanted to get everyone from the background into the foreground, at least for a second.”
Stigter never cuts away from Kurtz’s film. We hear Helena Bonham Carter’s narration, and the voices of experts and Holocaust survivors, but the speakers themselves remain unseen, appearing only as headshots at the end.
The documentary is like a detective story, or an archeological operation where Kurtz’s film is “the remnant from the past”. Glenn’s obsession with discovering names established for Stigter how difficult it was to find out information about people. She therefore focused on other details.
Since the Nazis had tried to wipe out not just Europe’s Jews but everything about their world as well, “you feel that kind of idea of erasure happening”, she says. “So, anything we could find out became a kind of small, small victory over that erasure.”
When Bonham Carter reels off seemingly superfluous facts about linden trees (leading to some surprising connections), it feels like tumbling down a rabbit hole, I suggest. “I was in a lot of rabbit holes,” confirms Stigter.
However, she included the information about the trees because it was something they could find out. “With people, it was much, much harder. And you can show that contrast and frustration.”
This idea is at its starkest around midway through the documentary, during a long, distressing account of the round-up of the town’s Jews, taken from the Ringelblum Archive in Warsaw.
No photographic evidence of the event is known to exist, and the only visual links to it in Kurtz’s footage are the town’s square and the outside of the synagogue. Stigter, then, moves slowly and hypnotically closer to the cobblestones of the former, until they lose their definition and become a blurry jumble.
Our imaginations are left to paint the violence and degradation described in the witness testimony, which she includes in its entirety.
“Absence can be as telling as presence,” she says. “And for me, this is also about the difference between written and visual sources, and making you aware of those.”
The documentary plays with these tensions, and Stigter says that because we know the fate of most of the happy, smiling people in the film, it creates “contradictory emotions”.
“On the one hand, you’re so close to these people that suddenly we can look them in the eye. At the same time, we cannot cross time and warn them; they are locked in that piece of film. So in that sense there’s the illusion of nearness that film can bring, but then the devastating realisation that it is just an illusion.”
There were few signs that Nasielsk’s Jews had ever existed when she first visited the town (this has now changed, thanks largely to Glenn and descendants of other survivors) to record sounds and do interviews.
Steve McQueen and Bianca Stigter GettyImages-1280618599
Steve McQueen and Bianca Stigter (GettyImages)
Indentations on doorposts where mezuzahs had been were ghostly echoes of a world that never came back to life, because most survivors “went to places like Israel or America”. She heard that gravestones from a Jewish cemetery on the edge of town had been used to build a Second World War airstrip, but could not confirm the story.
Glenn came into contact with one survivor, Maurice Chandler, after his granddaughter recognised him as a 13-year-old in the film. Stigter also met him in America, and he is one of two survivors whose voices appear in the documentary.
“Mr Chandler was not present during the round-up,” she says, “but his family was. He escaped to Bialystok just before, in October 1939, in the Soviet occupied part of Poland, together with a brother, and later came back to Warsaw, where he managed to escape again from the ghetto.”
When Chandler saw Kurtz’s film for the first time, “he said to his children,
‘Now you know I’m not from Mars’, because he didn’t have anything to show of his past.
“Now he had a little fragment that he could show.”
Stigter is hopeful that other names might be revealed as more people see Kurtz’s footage, or through the work of experts.
For example, following the discovery of a photograph from 1937 of boys in a yeshivah class in Nasielsk, a professor in Amsterdam is using facial-recognition software to try and find matches with boys who are shown in the film.
1 Three Minutes - A Lengthening © US Holocaust Memorial Museum
Another frame from the original film (US Holocaust Memorial Museum)
Meanwhile, a dentist friend of Stigter noticed that two people have gaps in their teeth, which are hereditary, suggesting they could be related.
“I never thought about looking at teeth to see relationships between people,” the director exclaims.
Considering how Three Minutes — A Lengthening could add to our understanding of the Holocaust, she says:“I think there’s a difference between knowing something and really realising that something happened.
For a lot of people, the Holocaust can seem like an abstraction. Here you can see it happened to one person at a time. To a child with a funny gap between his teeth. And to an old lady with a red headscarf.”
Three Minutes – A Lengthening is released on 2 December
