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.
Detailed preservation notes from the film lab are available in Film and Video department files. Additional photographs are available in the USHMM Photo Archives.
Scenes of the fire at night in Warsaw- these are the fires that burned on September 16, 1939 the first night of Rosh Hashanah, when the Germans set fire to the Jewish quarter destroying everything within a 20 block area (Jewish shops, homes, etc.) While it is difficult to make out- in the distance between the darkness and the flames you can see that there were bucket brigades set up and men were trying in vain to put out the fires. Julien Bryan's book"Sieg" (1940) has a passage that tells this story. More shots of the fire at 01:06:38:12 trees are visible silhouetted against the flames, and there is a horse drawn carriage passing by. Camera pans from the large flames, to a beautiful old four-five story building where flames are just barely visible flickering through some windows, it seems this building too will soon be in flames.
German siege of Warsaw, Poland 1939