Postwar destruction in Warsaw
The original film reel was also labeled"JB Pol Neg A 7771 Pol A33B Orig Neg R1 and R". Detailed preservation notes from the film lab are available in Film and Video department files. Additional photographs are available in the USHMM Photo Archives.
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.
Animated numbers scroll from 1940 to freeze on"Poland 194". Scenes of destruction in Warsaw and the liberation of the city, soldiers kissing women in the streets, getting flowers, several shots of destroyed cities (most likely stock news footage) 01:21:13 VS of the Poles working to rebuild their country, men and women, pounding in rail ties, sifting through mountains of debris, taking down buildings, etc. MLS of a group of barefoot children being lead through the rubble-filled streets by young women. The film then ends on shots of young, healthy children in postwar Poland, eating bread. **From Julien Bryan's film"Poland the Country and the Peopl" released in 1948.**