Detailed preservation notes from the film lab are available in Film and Video department files. Additional photographs are available in the USHMM Photo Archives.
One-room schoolhouse in central Poland
LS of young schoolgirls and boys in traditional Central Polish costume walking in an orderly fashion along a dirt road. They walk toward the camera, a hen follows. Blonde girl with long braids in a classroom draws intently. A girl runs on the playground, her head covered with a scarf. LS, brick schoolhouse in the BG. Young boys and girls exit the building to play. Boy on a bicycle in Lowicz. INTof male instructor pointing to Polish letters on a blackboard. An icon image of the Madonna and Child hangs above the board. Two boys recite the letters along with the teacher at the blackboard. Girls at their desks read and write, share the textbook, and write in their notebooks. EXT, a mother and child, both in traditional dress run across a courtyard. Back in the classroom, low light, young girls look up at Bryan's camera. MS, the teacher walks around and reviews the children's progress (more boys than girls in the schoolhouse). EXT, girls in traditional dress walk along a path. Four older men in very heavy coats and hats stand near a stone wall, smoking and talking. A few peasant women pass by. CUs, one man smiles, one continues to smoke, another looks away. EXT, brick and iron gate of a cemetery, a statue of the Madonna atop the gate, several people walking. Several women walk and talk, some holding small bouquets of flowers. They pass a horse drawn carriage and continue on.
Julien Hequembourg Bryan (1899-1974) was an American documentarian and filmmaker. Bryan traveled widely taking 35mm film that he sold to motion picture companies. In the 1930s, he conducted extensive lecture tours, during which he showed film footage he shot in the former USSR. Between 1935 and 1938, he captured unique records of ordinary people and life in Nazi Germany and in Poland, including Jewish areas of Warsaw and Krakow and anti-Jewish signs in Germany. His footage appeared in March of Time theatrical newsreels. His photographs appeared in Life Magazine. He was in Warsaw in September 1939 when Germany invaded and remained throughout the German siege of the city, photographing and filming what would become America's first cinematic glimpse of the start of WWII. He recorded this experience in both the book Siege (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1940) and the short film Siege (RKO Radio Pictures, 1940) nominated for an Academy Award in 1940. In 1946, Bryan photographed the efforts of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency in postwar Europe.