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.
CUs of belongings amid rubble. These belongings are all that remain for the Poles featured here who have been displaced from their homes by the German air attacks. MS, camera pans another destroyed interior- this time it is a church (discussed in the book"Sieg" (1940)) The priest is inside taking things out of the sacristy, trying to salvage the relics, etc, several people mill about outside. CU of a young girl with a dog in her arms, this is the same girl that was seen in Story 3982 on this tape - USHMM Film ID 3003. 01:15:41 VS of destruction to a cemetery, CU of another corpse. CU of a loaf of bread in a woman's hands. Cut to a scene of a young girl praying in front of a small altar she has set up outdoors, there are candles, and she is reading from prayer book. 01:16:15:29 MLS, more scenes of destruction.
German siege of Warsaw, Poland 1939