Devastating lost footage of Polish Jews revealed in new Holocaust doc

nypost.com:

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which posted it on its website.Two years later, he received an email from a woman in Detroit named Marcy Rosen.“She told me in this email that someone had brought the film to her attention and she’d viewed it online and … she suddenly saw a face and recognized her grandfather as a 13-year-old boy.”Rosen’s mother phoned her father, Maurice Chandler — the teen in the video — who was still living.

He said to her, “Now you know I’m not from Mars.” Chandler helped bring to life what Kurtz was witnessing. He pointed out and named his little friends and the school teacher, among others.All told, Kurtz was able to locate seven Nasielsk survivors by 2012, two of whom appear in the video: Chandler and an unnamed woman.

Kurtz learned from another survivor about the morning of December 1939 when, at 7:30 a.m., all of the Jewish residents were violently forced to the town square by Nazis wielding whips before they were sent away on trains.

But the footage captures a beautiful, vibrant time before the Jewish residents’ lives were cruelly ripped away.In the documentary, Chandler explains what he was feeling as Kurtz’s grandfather filmed him with a video camera — a “magic” device he’d never encountered before. “What was in my mind at that time?