Almost 80 years on, 10 minutes of footage taken in the Warsaw Ghetto by a young, non-Jewish Pole can be seen for the first time, in a new documentary. Its director, Eric Bednarski, laments the fact that many people still don’t know about the Holocaust. There may be nothing more fascinating than seeing the banal and the familiar: a busy main street, pedestrians in long garments hurriedly clearing a path for themselves along the crowded sidewalk. Men in flat caps and women carrying small black leather bags or holding packages wrapped in paper flit by the camera. Occasionally, they are obscured by a passing bicyclist, or by a streetcar or truck that rumbles by. Were it not for the ruins of buildings clearly visible in the background, this bustling morning scene might be set in any metropolis in the middle of the last century. But this temporary city and most of its occupants would not survive much longer. In 1941, a young Pole named Alfons Ziołkowski shot 10 minutes of 8-mm. film in the Warsaw Ghetto. For nearly 80 years, this reel of film languished in a dusty box in a Polish apartment. Now, the never-before-screened footage has been woven into a new documentary by Canadian director Eric Bednarski, entitled “Warsaw – A City Divided.”
via haaretz: Never Before Seen Footage From the Warsaw Ghetto