Domestic cinema against oblivion: to the rescue of life filmed before the Holocaust

Children laugh, run and jump in front of the camera.

The street and the square are filled with onlookers.

There is a grocery store with a woman at the door and the elderly, on the threshold of their houses, covertly observe the invention while some men and women join in the childish merriment.

A family leaves a restaurant, and on their stairs a girl stops, interrupting their steps as she stares at the target.

These are some of the images of two 16-millimeter rolls, one in black and white and the other in color, from the Jewish neighborhood of Nasielka, 50 kilometers from Warsaw, a place that just a year later had been liquidated by the Nazis.

Its 3,000 inhabitants, deported in December 1939 to ghettos in different Polish towns, ended up in the Treblinka extermination camp.

Barely 80 residents survived.

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New visions of the Holocaust

These brief scenes from before the Holocaust were found in 2009 by Glenn Kurtz, the grandson of its author, David Kurtz, in an old toothpaste can.

His grandfather, a Polish Jew who made his fortune in the United States, had returned to his hometown on vacation in 1938 with his car and his

camera slung over his shoulder.

The family owned a DVD copy, but the negative was now virtually useless, a solidified mass that Kurtz sent to the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, where his conservation and restoration team saved and digitized it.

What came next is a thrilling story of research and film archeology that inspired a book by Kurtz's grandson, and now a movie,

, by the Dutch Bianca Steiger, who digs deep into that file to reveal who were those people to whom, as Steiger says in a telephone conversation, one just wants to shout, "Get out, get out of there running!".

Released in Spain by Filmin,

is part of a domestic film recovery project promoted by a center that this month has made public a new finding.

This is another movie hidden in a basement.

Still in the process of restoration, it allows us to remember the trip, also shot in 16 millimeters, of another emigrant to the United States.

Harry Roher returned to his house in Mykolaiv, a town near Lviv, then Poland, now Ukraine, with a car, a cigar and his amateur camera.

23 minutes are preserved in black and white through which entire families parade.

They are farmers and merchants, men in hats, suits, and ties;

girls with long braids, bows and white dresses and old women with flowered scarves.

They approach to greet the camera, nervous and jovial.

It is impossible to observe these images without being conditioned by what we know,

a barbarity off camera that permeates each shot.

The fate of most of these people was nearby, in the Belzec extermination camp, built a hundred kilometers from the town.

Still from the home tape that appears in 'Three Minutes: An Exploration'.Filmin

Leslie Swift, head of the audiovisual department of the Holocaust Museum, explains the reasons that have led the center to turn to the urgent search for home movies: "

they are essential to complete the historical picture and are finally claimed as first-rate sources.

His story is not within the official narrative or propaganda.

They do not belong to the dominant discourse, they are individual stories and their study and identification is very important because they humanize the narrative”.

Swift explains that the pull effect has been key, and that Roher's film would never have made it to the museum without Kurtz's film.

“Most of our funds come from Israel and the United States, but we are very interested in finding films like these in Latin America, that is now our challenge.

There are hardly any survivors of the Holocaust left and we are working against the clock, because it is not just about conserving and restoring.

Our goal is to identify the largest number of people who appear in these films.”

It was a woman who had seen the recording of David Kurtz on the museum's website who recognized her 13-year-old grandfather among the children who jumped in front of the camera.

Moszek Tuchendler lived in Florida under the name Maurice Chandler and was key in identifying many of the 150 people who swarm the film.

When the old man saw the images for the first time, he told his children: "Now you know that I do not come from Mars."

The first time Bianca Steiger saw the David Kurtz tapes was also on the museum's website.

“It caught my attention that one of them was in color;

that made her an even greater rarity.

Emotions were found, it is impossible to separate what we see from what we know.

The pressure that these films transmit is enormous.

But most of all I felt that they represent a victory against the attempt to erase an entire culture.

Their power is pure, they are ordinary images made extraordinary”.

Steiger's project, cultural journalist and former film critic at the Dutch newspaper

was born from a commission from the Rotterdam festival, which asked a series of critics for a free-themed video-essay.

It was the embryo of a 70-minute project produced by British filmmaker Steve McQueen that expands the three-minute archive through the figures that appear on the tape, but also through his own skin, those textures and cracks of a footage

that explored in depth and with sensitivity is amazing.

"Domestic cinema has always been something like the ugly duckling of film conservation," explains Jaime Pena, programmer at the Filmoteca de Galicia and author of

fundamental essay on how modern and contemporary cinema assimilated through the representation of the absence the images of the concentration camps.

“For obvious and understandable reasons, the first efforts were aimed at recovering and preserving cinema on professional supports, made for commercial or artistic purposes”, adds Pena.

But in recent times, domestic cinema has been one of the clearest objectives for film libraries: a familiar and intimate world is hidden there, rarely dealt with by documentary cinema, which always prioritized the exceptional and the novel, not to mention fiction. ”.

The tension between absence and presence turns these home movies into a challenge to oblivion and to those who put all their efforts into erasing these people from the map.

As Leslie Swift explains, these films humanize the victims of the Holocaust because they remind us of the common life behind the unbearable images that followed and alienated millions of Jews as a malnourished and sick mass, living corpses, or outright dead. , to those who were denied their past.

The Nazis, in their perverse and persevering crusade toward the extermination factory, went to great lengths to confiscate all the home movies treasured by Jewish families.

"That's why every recording saved is a triumph," insists Steiger.

"Jewish history cannot be linked only to death, but also to life,

Image from 'Three minutes: an exploration'. Filmin

“Of course it is a form of victory”, adds Pena.

“After all, the task was to erase everything, human lives and the traces of their own passage on Earth.

That is why there are so few testimonies, especially after 1939, even the fact that the photographs in the

[made by an SS officer and miraculously rescued by the Jewish prisoner Lilly Jacob] or the four clandestine photographs of the Sonderkommandos [the only ones that testify to the extermination in the gas chambers].

Deportation implied the confiscation of all belongings, both what they left behind at home and what they carried in their suitcases on the way to the concentration camps.

And there they had to lose many photographs and many domestic films: among the more affluent Jews the 9.5 had to be extended and perhaps also the 16 mm, as in the case of Kurtz, although he came from America, I don't know if it was in Europe so usual.

But I think this is a terrain that is going to hold many surprises in the future."

Leslie Swift agrees that this could be the beginning of a fascinating path for a museum whose audiovisual collections bear the name of Steven Spielberg (“30 years ago he made a very generous donation that allowed us to start our work”, shares Swift) and at the same time houses , among others, all the brutes of

, the work of a lifetime by Claude Lanzmann, who collected, with incalculable historical and cinematographic value, the testimonies of the most direct witnesses of the Jewish extermination and, at the same time, led a bitter debate on the use of images and representation of the Holocaust.

"With the last witnesses missing," concludes Pena, "we will only have a few images that tell us more about what is not there and about the contrast with what came after than about their own circumstances, even though it is very good that they show us that this people were also happy.

In the end, it is the triumph of archival images, much as Lanzmann dislikes”.

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