To commemorate National Holocaust Remembrance Week, FRONTLINE travels back in time to a family shtetl, a small village in Bransk, Poland, with producer
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shtetl/
Ms. Hoffman, a former editor at The New York Times Book Review, visited Bransk, a town on the Nurzec River in eastern Poland that was the subject of a documentary film, also called "Shtetl", produced and directed by Marian Marzynski and shown on "Frontline" on the Public Broadcasting System last year.http://www.dialog.org/hist/hof.html Ms. Hoffman speaks to people in Bransk. She reads its Yizkor book, a Jewish Book of Memory, written two years after World War II. She spends time with one Zbigniew Romaniuk, a remarkable young resident of the town who took it on himself to research its Jewish history. He and some other young men, none of them Jews, even created a memorial Jewish cemetery made out of gravestones that they unearthed and restored. Ms. Hoffman, who is Jewish, also interviews the few Jews who survived in a town that once had about 4,000 of them, more than half the total population. And she examines the scattered documents that are available to complete a history of Jewish life in Bransk that goes back to the 18th century..http://www.dialog.org/hist/hof.html.
http://www.logtv.com/films/shtetl/
The film starts when Marian Marzynski, the filmmaker accompanies Nathan Kaplan, a 70 year-oldJ ewish man from Chicago to Bransk, a smallPolish shtetl in Eastern Poland.It is here where their confrontation with the past begins.Throughout the film, several Holocaust survivors will make their way back to Bransk and share with us their stories. Shtetl takes a bold and illuminating look at Jewish/Polish relationships in both the past and the present. Shot in Poland, Israel, and the United States, Shtetl is a universal tale about Jews and those who live around them.However, unlike Shoah, which tells the story of these who died, Marzynski's Shtetl is a film about those who survived. Its moral is about civil rights for a minority living in a multi-ethnic society.
-- Filmmaker Marian Marzynski looks at history through the eyes of the present in the three hour Shtetl. Produced over the course of four years, Shtetl takes a bold and illuminating look at Jewish/Polish relationships in both the past and the present.Shot in Poland, Israel, and the United States by Slawomir Grunberg, Shtetl- like Claude Lanzman's Shoah- is a universal tale about Jews and those who live around them.
http://www.logtv.com/films/shtetl/