Ruins of Warsaw, Poland 1946

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. Opens in 1946- Warsaw, Poland, snow covered ground and destroyed buildings; military vehicle and electric bus pass by one of the destroyed buildings, cut to horse drawn carriages going down these same streets. 01:01:00:00 The destroyed DEUTSCHE BANK, a horse and carriage move through the frame. More destroyed building facades. 01:01:20:24 1946, Warsaw, Poland, MCU of a young boy making the sign of the cross at a cemetery. VS of wooden crosses and grave markers (name placards) for the dead, several names and dates listed: 1941, 1942, etc. Men, women and children pay their respects; children place flowers and candles at the graves. CUs of women crying over the graves. CUs of graves. The last indicates someone who died in Auschwitz.