Unpicking the past

A coastal feature, supposedly fortified in prehistoric times (although I've always failed to see why people would retreat to rocky headland with no water source or obvious escape route if they were under threat.) There's no trace of them left nor of anything they constructed or created here.


It being Holocaust Day I watched Three Minutes: a Lengthening (BBC but I imagine it's available elsewhere).

A snatch, literally, of film footage shot in a Jewish community in Poland in 1938 by an American immigrant who had returned to his childhood home with a movie camera forms the basis of the documentary.
His grandson found the home movie and set about trying to identify the faces that jostle for attention. 
" As Kurtz’s camera panned across the town square, the faces of grinning excited children surge into the forefront, with warier, curious adults in the background. This film recounts the historical process of digitally restoring the film, deciphering shop signs, identifying buildings, and then putting it up online and asking for survivors to come forward."


Astonishingly, they did. Many of the individuals whose grainy images flicker past the movie camera are named and remembered  by survivors. The name of the grocery shop is discovered and the doors of the synagogue are brought into focus. It's an incredible piece of reconstruction and revival, allowing us to peek into a vibrant community that was shortly to be destroyed, its populace deported and  murdered in the concentration camps.

YouTube

Now that movie cameras and mobile phones are everywhere this sort of digital  retrieval of the past is no longer a novelty. Indeed it's happening right now and much sooner after the event, as the grim film footage of recent war and civil crime has demonstated.