Rare Colored Video: Warsaw’s Jewish Streets, 1939
Published
In 1939 color film, men in black coats walk Warsaw’s Nalewki Street past shops for curtains and hats. Boys crowd the camera and laugh.
Benjamin Gasul, 1939. Silent 16mm Kodachrome color. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, gift of the Gasul Family.
This is rare color film of Warsaw’s Jewish streets in 1939. Dr. Benjamin Gasul of Chicago shot it on 16mm Kodachrome. Men in black coats walk Nalewki and Nowolipki. Boys crowd the lens and laugh.
Gasul titled the street sequence The Jewish Ghetto. Those were still open streets. The sealed ghetto came in 1940. The Karl Höffkes archive lists the same shots as 1937. The museum dates the reel to about June 1939.
Timeline
- About June 1939
- Gasul films the Jewish streets around Nalewki and Nowolipki in Kodachrome.
- 1 September 1939
- Germany invades Poland.
- October–16 November 1940
- The sealed Warsaw ghetto is ordered, then the gates are shut.
- April–May 1943
- Warsaw ghetto uprising. Nalewki is destroyed.
- December 2006
- The Gasul family donates the reel to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.