Coming up on today’s Moncrieff Show, Seán will be talking to Glenn Kurtz about some old family holiday footage he found in his parents’ wardrobe in Florida one day, but which turned out to have incredible historical significance.

Seán will learn all about it today at 2.30pm, and you can listen live here: http://www.newstalk.com/player/

The tape, shot in 1938 by his grandfather during a sight-seeing trip around Europe, takes in the usual attractions like Paris and the Swiss Alps, with the happy Americans waving at the camera. But the 16mm film becomes something incredibly special when David Kurtz pays a visit to Nasielsk in Poland, his place of birth, and then a thriving Jewish community of 3000 people. By the end of the war, fewer than 100 of them would have survived.

Glenn Kurtz quickly recognised that this three-minute footage is one of the last remaining links to the town’s inhabitants.

"The longer I spent with my grandfather’s film," he writes in his book Three Minutes in Poland, "the richer and more fragmentary its images became." The faces of the people of Nasielsk became a mystery to be solved, and soon Kurtz set out on a mission to restore the footage and learn everything he can about the people on screen.

"I began to catch fleeting glimpses of the living town," Kurtz writes, "a cruelly narrow sample of its relationships, contradictions, scandals."

Travelling across the US to Canada, the UK, Poland and Israel, Kurtz scoured through archives and cemetaries, even a former Luftwaffe airfield, to find out anything he could about the Jews of Nasielsk. After donating the footage to the Holocaust Museum, chance encounters led Kurtz to tracking down seven survivors, including a 96-year-old woman who can be seen in the video standing beside the man she would later marry.

Glenn Kurtz will be sharing the incredible story today at 2.30pm, but in the meantime, the footage he found can be viewed here and his TED Talk is embedded below: