About four years ago, Glenn Kurtz discovered a film reel his grandfather shot in 1938 of the tiny, predominantly Jewish town of Nasielsk, Poland. Realizing that it was the only footage of this vibrant town before the Nazi occupation, Kurtz donated it to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum who made it available online. A few months later, he received a phone call from a young woman who explained that she recognized her grandfather in his film. Maurice Chandler now lives in Florida, but in 1938 he was a young, Jewish boy living in Poland, eager to be in the frame of David Kurtz's film. Using Mr. Chandler's story and those of other survivors, Kurtz breathes life back into this forgotten town with his new book Three Minutes in Poland. In the following excerpt, Mr. Chandler describes his escape from the Warsaw Ghetto in 1940 and the beginning of his remarkable journey of survival. Morry, Avrum, Shiye Brzoza, Avruml Jedwab, and Shimon Kaminski escaped the Warsaw ghetto in the simplest, most dangerous way possible: they rode the streetcar. Because the Warsaw Ghetto occupied a central place in the city, tramlines available only to “Aryans” were introduced in November 1940, cutting across the ghetto territory. These “transit” lines had a police escort and did not stop in the ghetto. But sometime in the spring of 1941, Morry heard a rumor that the Polish policeman who rode on the steps of the streetcar would let Jews on for a bribe of five złotys. He and the other four boys decided to take a chance.
