Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film, by Glenn Kurtz

9780374276775
Ferrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014
413 pp

hardcover

Three Minutes in Poland is a stunner of a book that anyone even remotely interested in the Holocaust should read.

David and Liza Kurtz returned from a six-week European vacation in 1938.  Seventy-one years later, their grandson Glenn discovered some old film cans in his parents' closet.  Luckily, some of those films had been transferred to video, and Glenn starts to watch one labeled "Our Trip to Holland Belgium Poland Switzerland France and England." He discovered three minutes of footage shot during the grandparents' time in Poland, a place that his father and his aunt named as Berezne, where David's grandmother was born. These three minutes show "a vibrant Jewish community in the summer of 1938," but by the end of the war, only 150 Jews out of 3,000 from Berezne had survived.   The original film, badly deteriorated,  was handed over to the Holocaust Memorial Museum where it was sent out for restoration.  With a copy of a DVD of the footage in hand, Kurtz went to visit a distant cousin of his grandmother's, who watched the film and "within a second," revealed to Kurtz that the segments in Poland had not been shot in Berezne.  Glenn realizes that the film was more likely shot in Nasielsk, his grandfather's home town thirty five miles northwest of Warsaw.  The Jews in this town had their lives turned upside down in 1939, just one year after his grandparents' visit; the majority of them met their fate in Treblinka in 1942.  Only eighty of them survived.  A conversation with one of these survivors led to a positive identification of the town as Nasielsk, and Kurtz began a thorough search for any information about the people who had lived there.

While he is spending time in libraries, museums, archives etc., someone else who is digging through historical records comes across Kurtz's film online at the Steven Spielberg Holocaust Archive.  He sends a link to family members and one of them, while watching the footage, recognizes her grandfather as a boy.  From there Kurtz meets Morris Chandler, who became invaluable to Kurtz. Not only does Chandler have his memories, but Chandler also provides Kurtz with connections to survivors who are still living. From that meeting on, Three Minutes in Poland becomes a story of how Kurtz begins to piece together people's lives in Nasielsk, his grandparents' visit in 1938, and what ultimately happened to the Jews who lived there, as their last days approached starting in 1939.   As Chandler says,

"It's looking back and saying, Yes, there was a world. Other than what we have lived all these years, knowing what happened. It was a real word there. I mean, people were going about their business. Kids were running, and doing all the things that kids do. And here I look at myself, and I see it was a happy face."

But he also notes

"I was never a child. I mean, right after this, the whole thing started, and I became an old man of fifteen, sixteen, seventeen."

 If you watch the film, Kurtz comments there that this three minutes of footage and Chandler's memories, "brought the town into memory again as a place of life instead of just a place of death." Considering what happens only one year after it's shot, it's a beautiful and fitting sentiment. Three Minutes in Poland is filled with survivors' stories -- and every time another connection was made, it became

"a small remnant of the web of interrelations that exists in any town. Before its destruction, the town itself -- its culture, its gossip, its physical life -- had held these connections."

The film becomes "the medium that brought the pieces together, unexpectedly creating a new kind of community," and as the blurb notes, this three minutes "became the most important record of a vibrant town on the brink of extinction."

It is a stunning, beautiful and eerie book, to be sure, and I am already thinking of a number of people to whom I'm going to give a copy.  It is a detective story of sorts, one that takes its readers back to a time of great loss, but also into the vibrant lives of real people. The author's passion shines through on every page, and it is so well written that even without the photos that are scattered throughout the book, I could visualize things in my head very clearly. When you read a book like this one, you will never forget it.

I won't.

Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague 1941-1968, by Heda Margolius Kovály

9780841913776
Holmes & Meier, 1997
originally published 1973 as Na vlastní kůži
translated by Franci Epstein and Helen Epstein, "with the author"
192 pp

paperback

Finding this book was a stroke of luck, actually.  After having read Kovály's novel Innocence; or Murder on Steep Street (Soho, June 2015), I realized that the crime component of that book wasn't the entire story there.  The time, the place, and the people are what really stuck out for me, and it hit me that the story going on all around the mystery was much more important than the crime itself. I decided that I absolutely had to know more about this woman, and bought this book. What better place could there be to find out what motivated her than her own memoirs?  Under a Cruel Star is a short but very powerful book, one that you won't forget after you've finished it. It is a story of a woman who managed to survive during two extremely repressive regimes; it is also an examination of human nature and the moral choices people make under these circumstances.

Kovály's memoir covers a span of time from 1941 to 1968.  The author found herself part of the  "mass deportation" of the Jews from Prague that began in 1941, where, along with her family, she was sent to the Łódź ghetto.  They joined "close to one hundred thousand Polish Jews living in unimaginable conditions," but  Kovály found herself transported to Auschwitz before the end of the war and taken to do labor at another work camp.  As the Russian troops were advancing and were "so close to our camp that we could hear the rumbling of battle," the Nazis evacuated the camp, making the prisoners walk under heavy guard from Poland into Germany.  During this journey, the author and a small group of women decided to make a break for freedom and made it back to the Czech border.  Upon arriving in Prague, she discovered that trying to find food and shelter, even from friends, was not an easy task. Even her very best friend who had promised her family that he would do anything he could for them, reacts with horror when she knocks on his door.  After asking her what sense it would make "to risk one life for another," he admits that he's driven by fear -- after all, on the streets, columns were posted with lists of names who had been "executed for crimes against the Reich," which often meant entire families had been killed for trying to help, as she writes, "someone like me." Luckily, Kovály was taken in and helped by the Resistance up until the end of the war, when it was safe to return from hiding. During this time she married her husband Rudolf.

Yet, as she writes,  survivors were always not welcomed home with opened arms -- they'd often find themselves coming back to no home, or to trusted friends who'd kept their property and who now denied anything had been left with them.  Even worse, when they tried to get legal help, they were often scorned:

"It would also happen that a survivor might need a lawyer to retrieve lost documents and he would remember the name of one who had once represented large Jewish companies. He would go to see him and sit in an empire chair in the corner of an elegant waiting room, enjoying all that good taste and luxury, watching pretty secretaries rushing about. Until one of the pretty girls forgot to close a door behind her, and the lawyer's sonorous voice would boom through the crack, 'You would have thought we'd be rid of them finally, but no, they're impossible to kill off -- not even Hitler could manage it. Every day there're more of them crawling back, like rats..."

The survivors -- the Jews, partisans, returning political prisoners -- also had to contend with black marketeers and former collaborators who turned the Nazi defeat to their own advantage. Bureaucracies forced the returnees to jump through near-impossible hoops to get their lives going again.   Kovaly notes that she didn't find it surprising that people would turn to Communism, due to the "sheer despair over human nature which showed itself at its very worst after the war." Other factors (including the failure of prewar democratic ideals, the forsaking of the country by Western Allies, and the liberation of Prague by the USSR, plus blatant lies of citizens who'd lived in the Soviet Union) helped to set the stage for the rise of Communism in Czechoslovakia.  The author also states that "the most eagerly embraced belief of the time was that no national or racial oppression could exist under Communism."  While true that not everyone joined the Communist Party, Heda and her then husband Rudolf Margolius did, buying into the idea that building socialism would result in "peace, in an industrially-advanced country, with an intelligent, well-educated population."  But, as she goes on to explain, by the early 1950s these ideals had been largely forgotten and things had decidely turned for the worse, even though her husband had a high-level position in the new government. Arrests were being made under the "direct guidance of Soviet advisors whose task it was to purge the ranks;" ironically, as she says, those who had never joined the Party actually enjoyed a "temporary respite." Her husband, sadly, became a victim of the purges, despite his high Ministry position, he was arrested and eventually  executed as part of the Slanksy affair which resulted in other arrests, a series of show trials,  and state-ordered executions in 1952.

The bulk of this book is in how Heda survived after her husband's arrest, his official ouster from the Party, and his death. For her, it was a time in which she lost everything but her son.  Her name was enough to deny her even the most basic necessities -- for example,  once while at death's door she was turned out of a hospital when they discovered who she was. Her work was terminated and she was left wondering how to make ends meet. Only a few brave people would continue to even associate with her and even some of her son's friends were no longer allowed to play with him. She spares nothing in describing how all-encompassing life under the Communists could be -- the regime reached down into every aspect of life, controlling seemingly ordinary people through brutality and fear. Ironically, while the average citizen on the street finds his or her life sliding into chaos, the powers-that-be led altogether different lifestyles.  Her account ends with a brief Prague Spring under 1968 before the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia; she herself left the country shortly afterwards.

There were times while I read this book that I was appalled, but quite frankly, there were times when I could seriously understand why some people made the choices that they did. While Under a Cruel Star is a very personal story, it can also be seen as an exploration of human nature under the most arduous and extreme conditions.   You can also read it as an understanding of how the best of idealistic intentions can often result in a nightmare.  It is also a study in the effects of totalitarianism on everyday, average people who, because of the need  to survive in an atmosphere of complete fear, often feel compelled to choose self-interest over the welfare of  fellow human beings,  keeping their heads down and getting on with their lives. Thankfully, there were others who chose not to go that route, or the author and countless others like her might never have survived.  I don't often read memoirs but as difficult as this one was to get through at times, I'm very happy I did. Highly recommended.

Village of Secrets: Defying the Nazis in Vichy France, by Caroline Moorehead

9780062202475
Harper, 2014
384 pp

arc - from the publisher, thank you!

"Parallel to the map of Vichy is a map of decency." 

Now here's a book definitely worth every second of time I put into it. It's also one that stayed with me for some time after finishing it.

In the author's Foreword to this book, she notes that  in 1953 an article appeared in Peace News about a pacifist pastor named André Trocmé in the French parish of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon who "helped save some 5,000 hunted communists, Freemasons, resisters and Jews from deportation to the extermination camps of occupied Poland."  According to this piece, Trocmé had instilled his belief in non-violent, peaceful resistance among his parishioners, and it was in this spirit that they were led to take in, hide, and sometimes get people whose names "appeared on Nazi death lists" safely over the Swiss border.  Over two decades later, in  1988,  Le Chambon was designated by Yad Vashem as the only village in the world to be  "Righteous Among Nations," an appellation that  in combination with a number of articles, documentaries, and memoirs about this remote village in the Massif Central, perpetuated an ongoing  "myth" about Trocmé's role and that of Le Chambon as well.  But there's a problem here:  by focusing solely on this small, remote village and this peace-loving Protestant pastor, over the years that "myth" has ignored a lot of other people -- those from other places, of other beliefs, and even a number of  humanitarian authorities who literally risked everything to help save people designated for the camps.

In Village of Secrets, the author begins her study with the coming of the Nazis to France in 1940 and the establishment of the Vichy government under Pétain. At first, early measures of repression against certain targeted groups ("foreign" Jews, Freemasons and Communists) were accompanied by propaganda that targeted these groups as "dark forces of the 'anti-France." However, as time went on, it became clearer that the government was expected to play a role in helping the Nazis  implement their own policies against the Jews -- not just the foreign-born, naturalized citizens, but eventually the French-born Jews, who'd mistakenly believed that their status offered some modicum of safety. As the author points out, not everyone was willing to stand by and watch this happen -- a number of organizations and individuals stepped in to save as many people as possible, especially the children. Networks were created to put their plans into action, and the remote, inaccessible-in-winter Plateau Vivarais-Lignon was one location where these volunteers were willing to leave those they'd managed to save from the camps.  Pastor Trocmé had told his Le Chambon parishioners that it was their duty to ""resist whenever our adversaries demand of us obedience contrary to the order of the gospel" --  and the people took his message to heart, taking in new arrivals. Many of the people on the Plateau were members of various sects that practiced quietness, so there was little chance that they'd open up to strangers who might come looking for those in hiding.  But, as Ms. Moorehead states, it wasn't just the villagers in Le Chambon, nor was it just those of the Protestant faith who helped save lives on the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon. Members of the Catholic, Quaker, and Jewish faiths also contributed, as did agnostics & atheists. There were other villages where community co-operation helped save lives, and most surprisingly, she tells of some of  the local authorities and policemen who turned a blind eye to what was going on, often providing warnings of impending Gestapo visits. As time went on, members of the Resistance were taken in, as were young men who refused to report for the national Service de Travail Obligitaire -- a national conscription for forced labor in Germany. And it was in this mountain area that "more people, proportionately, were saved than anywhere else in France."

While the accounts she relates are intriguing, heroic and often heartbreaking, one very important issue this book touches on is history itself. Right after the war, as she notes, the French

"were encouraged, not only by DeGaulle but by all the political classes, to believe that Vichy had been the work of a small number of traitors, more misguided than evil, drawn into treachery by the Germans."

That view would change some years later in the 1970s, as authors such as Robert Paxton and Michael Marcs "meticulously pulled the myth apart," to show that the big players in Vichy actively sought collaboration with the Nazis, with the goal of "carving out a new role for France in Hitler's new Europe." Their work brought on debates that are still part of the French political scene, and they also brought out the long-neglected story of the Jews in France during the Holocaust.  But this period of history is still debated among people throughout  the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon, the result of a contentious trifecta:  1) the publication  of a book based on Trocme's autobiography by an American historian looking for "proof that pacifism could successsfully counter violence," 2) a documentary that used some of the material in that book, and 3) a lecture given by the book's author that came across to the people who had lived it as "a mutilation of historical truth by revisionists." 

Village of Secrets is a most excellent book that, as its bottom line, examines how ordinary people responded to very extraordinary circumstances during this terrible period.  It is also an examination of  the realities behind the myths and the changing discourses evolving from this historical period.  It is an incredibly well written and  meticulously-researched narrative that uses first-person accounts of people who lived to tell their tales due of the help they received from others, as well as accounts from some of those who helped them to survive.  What really struck me here were the stories of those who were brought into hiding and ultimately stayed safe through the war - these are interspersed throughout the narrative and for me were the most powerful parts of the entire book. For some of them, the aftermath of living in hiding wasn't all positive and led to issues they had to overcome later in life. Every time one of these stories came up, I put down my note-taking pen because I wanted to catch every single word. I can't even begin to imagine what they lived through.

I don't often find myself reading World War II European history, so a lot of things were totally new to me here, but I have to say that I was never once bored, nor did I ever feel like I was on information overload.  Reader reviews have been much more positive than negative,  and it seems to me that the naysayers have wanted everything given to them without wanting to take time to understand the overall history of this place in this time period. One reviewer referred to it as "a slog," which is absolutely not true.  If you're a lazy reader, that's your problem -- it's certainly not the problem of the author.   Village of Secrets is a much-appreciated addition to my history library, and I can't recommend this book highly enough.  

*********** 

My many thanks to TLC book tours who brought this book to my attention, and to the publishers for my copy of the book!

There are many more people reading Village of Secrets for TLC; if you want to follow other readers' opinions, you can find the schedule here.