Schoolhouse in the region of Katowice on the anniversary of the school's opening

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. VS, scene opens with a poster hanging on the outside wall of a new brick schoolhouse announcing the rededication of the school building. The sign is written in Polish. A celebration of the new building-the sign talks about the school going from an old thatched-roof hut to a new brick building-according to the sign this celebration is taking place in August 1937. Several shots of the children in the school yard playing happily, then a group of young children being lead by a very somber looking nun in single file to the school house. There is a very abrupt cut at the end of this scene. **From Julien Bryan's film "Poland the Country and the People" released in 1948, shot 1936-1937.**