Selected as a “Best Book of 2014” by The New Yorker, The Boston Globe, and National Public Radio.
Now the subject of the documentary film, Three Minutes: A Lengthening, directed by Bianca Stigter, co-produced by Academy Award-winner Steve McQueen, and narrated by Helena Bonham Carter.
Featured in The New York Times and on ABC Prime News Live and the BBC.
Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film
“Three Minutes in Poland begins as the story of an old family film rediscovered and veers into an important tale of Polish shtetls during World War II. It is intensely moving and brilliantly researched, and it reads like a thriller.”
“Kurtz’s quest to learn about the lost world depicted in his grandfather’s home movie is at the heart of this deeply moving, gorgeously written book.”
“[An] expansive, beautifully rendered micro-history. . . In the pages of Glenn Kurtz’s marvelous book, the ghosts from those three minutes are breathtakingly brought to life.”
“An impressive feat of historical research . . . In a genre so often preoccupied with the recitation of horrors, Three Minutes in Poland is the rare work that seems more about people than about ghosts.”
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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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The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum has published a lesson plan for Three Minutes in Poland for grades 7-12.
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Watch David Kurtz’s 1938 home movie.