42 | JANUARY 20 • 2022 

W

hat briefly was filmed in 1938 
to remember vacation travels in 
Poland came to circulate across 
the web, motivated a book and recently was 
expanded into a 69-minute movie to be 
shown virtually this month by the Sundance 
Film Festival.
The expressive milestones resulted from 
happenstance discoveries followed by deter-
mined research and connected families 
descended from residents of a small town, 
Nasielsk, where the three-minute clip of 
townspeople was filmed a year before Nazis 
decimated the town’s Jewish population.
Maurice Chandler, 97, who divides his 
time between Michigan and Florida, was 

one of the youngsters in the snippet noticed 
on the web by his granddaughter, Marcy 
Rosen of Bloomfield Hills, who recalled 
early family photos as she recognized her 
grandfather. Her observation led to vital 
resources for identifying the people shown 
so their stories could be told.
Glenn Kurtz of New York 
found the film — made by 
his late grandfather, David 
Kurtz — in the 2009 Florida 
home of his parents. The clip 
was donated to the United 
States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 
Washington, D.C., and put online as only 
one of the pathways Kurtz ultimately used 

to find the material written into Three 
Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World 
in a 1938 Family Film, published in 2014 by 
Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Bianca Stigter, a Netherlands historian 
and cultural critic, also caught sight of the 
brief film while roaming the 
web, and she became intrigued 
with the title and fascinated by 
the lively images. She went on 
to direct the narration of close-
ups and montages for Three 
Minutes — A Lengthening, 
which has been spotlighted in 
festivals on its way to theaters.
“One of the things that’s been so pro-
found for me about this whole story is 
something I never imagined would happen, 
and that is the relationships that developed 
as a result of it and the connections with 
people,
” said Kurtz, who remains close to 
the Chandler family and other Nasielsk 
families, organized descendent travel to the 
town and keeps attending film festivals to 
observe the emotional reactions of audienc-
es to the Stigter movie. 
“I think Bianca approached the film in 
a spirit very similar to the one I felt in my 
book,
” he said. “The main questions were 
who are these people and what happened to 
them as individuals even if it’s not possible 
in the end to gather all the information.
”
Kurtz, who teaches at the Gallatin School 
of Individualized Study at New York 

ARTS&LIFE
FILM

3-minute vacation fi
 lm snippet of 
small-town Jews in pre-Nazi Poland 
yields a touching, revealing movie. 

Slice of Life — 
and More

SUZANNE CHESSLER CONTRIBUTING WRITER

Bianca 
Stigter

Glenn Kurtz

FRANZISKA LIEPE

LEFT: This photo shows what became of the 
Chandler family home and textile business. 
It came to house a 21st-century restaurant. 
BELOW: Evelyn Rosen, Maurice Chandler and 
Dorris Chandler

