Poles bury their war dead, 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. Red Cross banner in the center of large memorial wreath- crowds of people- men women and children, this is POSTWAR footage, 1946. Polish soldiers are milling about, several military vehicles. Civilians: men, women and children, some with Red Cross armbands, a group of nurses, etc. They process to a cemetery gate, purchase candles for graves. In the BG a wooden coffin is moving past on the shoulders of some soldiers. White flags drape the gates to the cemetery. This scene cuts out before we enter the cemetery.