Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film by Glenn Kurtz

Author:Glenn Kurtz [Kurtz, Glenn]
Language: eng
Format: azw
ISBN: 9780374710804
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2014-11-18T05:00:00+00:00

11

A DIFFERENT STYLE OF TORTURE

I’M LOOKING AT a photograph of four young men. The photo is black-and-white, not quite three by five inches. The corners are bent and have begun to disintegrate; there are nicks in the surface and a few dark stains. But the four young men look at the viewer with a timeless teenage confidence, boys preening for the camera.

The four are all wearing buttoned-up jackets and open-collar shirts. Their pants are baggy and pleated. Two have on suits, while the other two wear the knickers typical for young men in Europe in the mid-twentieth century. Their hair is neatly combed. Their expressions are relaxed, playful, in one case provocative.

The man on the left, with an angular face, has a pronounced widow’s peak. He seems in the midst of saying something, judging by his slightly opened mouth with deep lines at the corners. The man next to him is much smaller. He has dark hair, and his head reaches just above the shoulders of his companions. His smile is crooked, and his body is tilted away from the man on his other side, the tallest of the group, who has his hand on the smaller man’s shoulder. The tall man is the one with the provocative expression. He smiles teasingly at the camera, as if he’s about to pull a prank. He grasps his friend’s shoulder with his right hand and reaches toward him with his left, as if he’s about to grab him, maybe throw him into a headlock, the way boys do. The fourth young man, at the right of the group, stands at an angle to the others. We see him mostly in profile. He squints against the light, and his jaw is set forcefully. He wears a white shirt and a double-breasted jacket, and with the steely gaze, the white collar against a black blazer, he looks almost like a young sailor scanning the horizon. At the bottom of the photo there are numbers handwritten in white ink, “4.7.43.” July 4, 1943.

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