01:03:45 Men digging in the aftermath of the German military air raids on Warsaw. Several refugees with bundles walk down the street, past where the ditches are being dug. Polish soldiers stand guard; civilians come up to them and question them. Scenes of the chaos in the streets after the German air attack. Two young men are recruited by a Polish soldier to help with the digging. They are all in suits and ties, some in trench coats and hats, and they keep digging. 01:04:18 Railway underpass, a train stuck on the tracks that are now covered with debris, women and men climb out of the railcar and over the debris. Polish soldiers with guns walking through the streets. Many civilians are milling about. Quick shot of a bridge over the Vistula River. 01:04:33 A shanty town that some survivors have set up where their homes once stood: families are trying to gather together their belongings; a young girl cleans her feet in a basin; young girl fixing her hair in a small mirror that she has propped up on a broken door. Refugees line up for bread outside a building, a soldier guards the door trying to keep things orderly. 01:04:57 CU of a wall riddled with bullet holes. Other buildings destroyed by bombs. HAS of church clocktower. People praying on their knees in the dirt outside of the wood frame church, the church has been damaged. A priest walks through the rubble outside the church.
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.
German siege of Warsaw, Poland, Sept. 1939