The Jewish quarter of Suwalki including Schul Gasse, the Big Synagogue of Suwalki. Market and Wesola streets with locals. The bi-weekly outdoor market in Suwalki. 00:03:02 Harold Brenner in dark jacket and hat holding birds with another young man. Pan, good CUs. 00:06:32 Herman, Lottie and Harold stand underneath the fishermen's stalls, conversing with the locals. Farmers bring in goods for the market by horse and wagon. An ice cream vendor's machine and a market stall containing horse shoes, wooden wash tubs, peat and logs for heating.



00:09:41 Livestock market scenes outside of Filipow. Herman claims to have traded horses here when he was twelve or thirteen. 00:10:06 COLOR Herman and Harold pet a goat.



Herman and Lotte Bland emigrated from Poland to the United States settling in Chicago and Milwaukee. Herman (1893-1945) was born in Filipow and Lotte (Zlata Marks, 1896-1953) was born in Suwalki. In 1937, they decided to visit their birthplaces with their children, Leonard and Harold. They traveled from New York to Le Havre on the SS Normandie. Herman, a motion picture operator and theater owner, brought along a Bell and Howell 16mm motion picture camera. At the age of twenty, Leonard, shot most of the footage and thus is not pictured in the film.

Also in Bland Family Collection

American Jews Lottie and Herman Bland took a trip with their two sons to visit their hometowns, Suwalki and Filipow, in 1937. The towns lie 15 miles apart in Northeastern Poland, near the border with Lithuania. Herman was a motion picture operator and theater owner and arrived in Poland equipped with a Bell and Howell 16mm camera. The four reels of film (mostly black and white with a few minutes of Kodachrome) are in excellent condition and show a variety of imagery depicting prewar Jewish life in an area of Poland from which we have very little footage. The donor of the collection, Harold Bland, was eight years old at the time of the trip. A Museum staff member collected the film from Mr. Bland at his home in Chicago, and also conducted an oral history in which he detailed his still quite vivid memories of the trip. Subjects include lengthy coverage of the Jewish orphanage and old age home in Suwalki, Jewish cemeteries in Filipow and Suwalki, the synagogue and market in Filipow, and townspeople creating peat bricks from bogs in Filipow. The Blands also encountered overt antisemitism – Harold reports that they saw graffiti reading “Kill the Jews” near the Suwalki market, and a desecrated gravestone in one of the cemeteries.