Product Description

The true story of Bransk, a small Polish shtetl that died overnight when all its Jewish residents were transported to Treblinka's gas chambers. A haunting story with tragic consequences emerges through interviews, photographs and personal stories.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #52541 in VHS
• Released on: 2000-03-28
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Formats: Closed-captioned, Color, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of tapes: 2
• Running time: 173 minutes

Amazon.com
This intelligently conceived documentary is a meditation on a shtetl (a Jewish ghetto), looking at the small Jewish enclave in the town of Bransk, in Poland. The Bransk shtetl disappeared entirely when the Nazis rounded up all the Jews who hadn't somehow managed to escape and murdered them in Treblinka. But decades later the vanquished community lives on in the memories and thoughts of people on the other side of the Atlantic. The film focuses first on an elderly American whose forebears lived in the shtetl and whose interest in the past led him to having an unlikely pen pal, a young gentile Pole who had developed an interest in Bransk's Jewish history. Traveling to Bransk, the elderly Chicagoan visited where the Jews had lived, and conversations he has with elderly residents are sometimes heartbreaking and sometimes horrifying. Troubling questions over whether someone helped Jews or joined in the persecution come up, and seeing these moral issues develop in the course of the film is fascinating. Indeed, the film isn't so much about the past as about how people look back at it, and how the past has created the present. The young Pole, with an unlikely interest in local Jewish history, visits America and meets with those who managed to escape from Bransk, and later visits Israel. And an elderly clothing store owner from Baltimore who survived the Holocaust in Poland returns to where he hid on the outskirts of Bransk, and his confrontations with the past are both heartening and deeply disturbing. This is a brilliant film that quietly builds momentum and makes a powerful statement about history and how we see it. -- Robert J. McNamara

Customer Reviews

Fascinating for Anyone Researching Jewish Roots in Poland
I found this video very informative and recommend it to anyone doing research into their Jewish/Polish roots. However, the narrator of the documentary is clearly not objective in his approach to the subject and concentrated too much on villifying the Polish inhabitants of Bransk. It would have been a better film had he concentrated more on the jewish history of Bransk and shtetls like Bransk. In fact, I was a bit concerned when the narrator was antagonistic towards the young Polish researcher whose work forms the basis of the movie. The Polish researcher seemed clearly upset by the narrator and, frankly, it was uncomfortable to watch the narrator attempt to make this one Polish man responsible for the behavior of his ancestors. The antagonism could result in the cessation of research. This would be an incredible loss since I believe there is still much to learn about the lives of our ancestors who lived for so many generations in Poland.

A Rendition of the Usual Anti-Polish Biases


Marian Marzynski has produced a long and tedious film that not only exhibits a pronounced anti-Polish slant, but fails to inform the viewer about the proper context of the tragic events that took place. A much better and objective source of information about Shtetl life, in my opinion, is Eva Hoffman's book Shtetl.

The content of Marzynski's film is so strongly Judeocentric that the viewer is almost made to think that nothing happened during WWII except the destruction of Jews. The viewer gets no hint of the fact that Poland, which had fallen to the Nazi German and the Soviet Communist aggression, was to suffer the loss of 3 million gentile lives in the hands of the Germans alone. Not a word is mentioned about the large number of Poles (and also some Jews) who had been deported from the Bransk area to horrible deaths in the Soviet gulags, partly the outcome of the large-scale collaboration of local Jews with the Soviets.

Marzynski presents other content in a tendentious manner. For instance, a scene depicts anti-Jewish prejudices in the form of a Polish peasant who supposes that Jews have lots of money. The viewer gets no idea of the economic disparities that had arisen between Poles and Jews, partly the result of centuries of a cozy relationship between Jewish merchants and the foreign rulers of Poland after the Partitions. And, of course, no mention is made of the fact that many Jews had equally distorted (not to mention also negative) views of Poles as that Polish peasant had of Jews.

Marzynski pays a great deal of attention to a small group of Poles who collaborated with the German Nazis against Jews. This completely ignores the fact that Poland had a much lower collaboration rate than most other European countries. Moreover, it ignores the sad fact that the biggest assistants to the Germans in the roundup and sending of Jews to their deaths were none other than the Jewish collaborators-especially the notorious Judenrat.

Marzynski presents a scene involving modern Israeli students. Judging by their questions and the tone and content of their anti-Polish accusations, one is struck by their frightful ignorance of basic historical facts. Not only do they have no idea of what Poles went through: They almost seem to think that Poles lived in freedom and prosperity during German rule. The tenor of Marzynski's scene involving Israeli students is corroborated by the kind of questions asked of Poles by visiting Israeli high school students (e. g., "What kind of pensions are those Polish guards of Auschwitz getting?"). The informed viewer cannot help but ask questions such as the following: "Who is teaching Israeli children such venomous bigotry against Poles?" "Denial of the Holocaust is not tolerated, so why are such Polonophobic prejudices tolerated?" "What kind of portent do the warped attitudes exhibited by Marzynski's sample of Jewish students have for present and future Polish-Jewish relations?"

Bierman review of Shtetl: A Journal of the Holocaust
A very interesting, informative and moving documentary of what was apparently a typical shtetl. Perhaps I am biased as my mother and her family spent her formative years in Bransk, but I found this film fascinating throughout. I highly recommend this film for anyone interested in Jewish or Polish history.