THREE MINUTES IN POLAND: DISCOVERING A LOST WORLD IN A 1930 FAMILY FILM

By Glenn Kurtz. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 352 pages, $30.)

The haunting, blurry images were so close to being lost, and so easily could have been discarded. When writer, musician and scholar Glenn Kurtz discovered home movie footage of a mostly Jewish town in Poland taken by his grandparents during a 1938 vacation to Europe, he couldn't let its ghosts fade. "I wanted to reach inside the frame and shake these people, scream to them, Get up! Run! Flee!" he writes. "I felt a visceral ache, a desperation to save them."

Who were those exuberant kids jumping up and down to get into the camera's view and the busy or bemused adults watching from doorways and the street? What happened to them? Kurtz knew the answer wouldn't be pretty — a year later, World War II would be raging, and the Holocaust unfolding. "Nasielsk's entire Jewish population was expelled in a single Aktion," on a single day, he writes, going on to describe the rapid chain of horrific events that left only 80 survivors.

Kurtz set out to find them, and after arduous research complicated by many dead ends (for instance, it was not the town his parents had thought it was), he succeeded. One, 13-year-old Moszek Tuchendler, was now Maurice Chandler of Boca Raton, Fla. Chandler and others told Kurtz stories that opened windows into the history of their childhood shtetl.

Kurtz's book is captivating as it evolves from mystery to history, and its unusual approach to examining the Holocaust — examining the vibrant life of a lost community rather than just the terrible demise of its inhabitants — is a sad but refreshing addition to the grim, vitally important library of that period.

PAMELA MILLER,

West/North news team leader

"Fives and Twenty-Fives" by Michael Pitre

Fives and Twenty-Fives

By Michael Pitre. (Bloomsbury, 380 pages, $27.)

Write what you know about is always wise counsel. Author Michael Pitre did.

The two-tour Iraq war veteran's first novel is about a platoon that fills potholes, 157 of them. Each with a bomb that needs to be located and blown up by a robot.

"Fives and Twenty-Fives" — always scan 5 meters around a vehicle visually before getting out, then check 25 meters on foot in every direction — centers on the lieutenant who leads the road repair unit, its medical corpsman and its Iraqi interpreter, who is nicknamed Dodge.

Their lives in a war zone are detailed: how they survive and cope with losing buddies and, interspersed throughout, how they adjust after being discharged.

The story seems so real — an astute touch adding Dodge for an Iraqi perspective — that you almost forget it's a novel after a while. And it hooks you. When is that second novel coming out?

Roman Augustoviz,

Sports copy editor