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The men in the village put on their hats, coats and ties. The women donned pretty dresses. The girls wore braided pigtails tied with ribbons.

Everybody had come out to greet native son Harry Roher, who returned to Mykolaiv after 25 years in America, with a car, cigars and his home movie camera.

It was 1936 in this small community near Lviv in what was then Poland, now Ukraine. Most of the people who lived there were Jewish. Grocers, farmers, peddlers, bakers.

And most were probably doomed — to be gunned down by the Nazis, worked to death in labor gangs or murdered in the gas chambers of the Belzec extermination camp soon to be built about 65 miles away.

As Harry Roher’s movie camera rolled, it captured in 23 minutes rare fragments of a world soon to be destroyed, innocent people unaware of the coming disaster and scenes that illustrate <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/11/13/nazi-war-crimes-evidence-comes-holocaust-museum-washington/" target=_blank>the tragedy of the Holocaust in World War II.</a>

Over the summer, his film, on a metal movie reel that had been stored in a basement, was donated to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington by his granddaughter, Melanie Roher, 74, of White Plains, N.Y.

The museum, which has separately just launched a project to gather Holocaust-era home movies, will have the film digitized in coming months.

The museum has been preserving Holocaust-era films for years, but this is the first time it has specifically asked for home movies, said Leslie Swift, special adviser for time-based media at the museum.

“It’s the intimacy and the individuality” that makes them so valuable, she said in an email. “The fact that we’re privileged enough to view these intimate family scenes of people whose lives are about to be completely upended.”

“It helps to humanize and individualize the vastness of the Holocaust and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/12/20/holocaust-survivors-memories-covid-zoom/" target=_blank>personalize history </a>that is sometimes only communicated through statistics,” she added.

Melanie Roher, the donor, said in a recent telephone interview: “These people have come alive again … [in] a world that doesn’t exist anymore.”

“It just gives you chills,” she said.

The Holocaust was the mass murder of Europe’s Jews by Nazi Germany and its allies before and during World War II. An estimated 6 million Jews were killed.

The movies were shot by Harry Roher and someone who was with him during a trip to Europe in 1936. His traveling companion is unknown. Harry Roher died in 1950.

Marvin Joseph

The film was previously enhanced digitally by the donor, but Swift, of the museum, said the new digitized version will be dramatically better. “It’s going to look gorgeous,” she said. It will be available later on the museum’s website.

Footage from that era is a relative rarity, she added, especially from that part of Eastern Europe. It was preserved only because Harry Roher brought it home with him and it was kept by his family.

“What good was it doing sitting in my basement?” Melanie Roher said in an email. She said she hopes some people in the film may be recognized and identified.

“At the very least, this window on a community that was destroyed by the Nazis will live on in the museum,” she said. “It is a memorial to all those faces in the film, all those children who were murdered.”

Harry Roher was 21 when he emigrated to the United States from Mykolaiv in 1910, according to U.S. government documents. His passage on the German liner President Lincoln was paid by his sister, Sally, who sold her pearls to get the money, Melanie Roher said.

Melanie Roher never got to know her grandfather. She was 2 years old when he died. But she said she learned Harry was apparently raised by grandparents and became bored working in the local potato fields, where he would often carve figures out of the potatoes.

In the United States, he became a successful dress designer and manufacturer, she said. He and his wife, Yetta, had four children and lived in a brick house in Brooklyn. He was in his mid-40s when he went back to Mykolaiv.

The silent, black-and-white footage begins with his festive departure from New York, amid much hugging and kissing. He traveled on the luxurious French ocean liner Normandie.

There are scenes, apparently shot by his traveling companion, of Harry on the boat, looking snappy in a white cap, white slacks and white shoes. He is wearing a coat and tie, and smoking a cigar.

There are scenes that appear to be in France and later in Lviv, Melanie Roher said.

Lviv is about 12 miles northwest of Mykolaiv, and there were close connections between then two places. (Thousands of Jews in Lviv were also massacred in the Holocaust.)

In Lviv, Harry is filmed embracing some well-dressed people who seem to be old friends or relatives. He has a warm smile and a receding hairline. He is the picture of success, in a three-piece suit, pocket hankie and a white fedora.

Melanie Roher said those who appear in this part of footage are unidentified. They were probably people her grandfather knew. “Why else is he taking their picture?” she said. “I’m assuming they’re cousins, relatives of some kind.”

The next scenes appear to be in Mykolaiv, she said. It looks like a rural, dusty place. The footage shows a synagogue, thatched roof buildings and farm wagons in the background. Men in the fields pause with their farm tools.

But other people seem to be wearing their best clothes.

“It’s like everyone got dressed up to be in the movie,” Melanie Roher said.

She added that she had once talked to a former resident of the town who survived the war and recalled Harry’s visit.

“She remembered this big exciting event [when] Roher came from America — in a car,” she said. “They had never seen a car in this village.”

Outside in the sunshine, groups of people walk toward the camera. One man gently herds three children forward to be filmed. A woman walks to the camera with her arm around a young man in suspenders who looks like he could be her son.

In another shot, half the town seems to have come out to see the rich American and his camera. Men with beards. Women in head shawls and aprons. Two teenage girls laugh as they hold hands.

And in another scene, a group of boys is assembled. Several look ragged, and the camera pans over their bare feet.

Glenn Kurtz, whose 2014 book, “Three Minutes in Poland,” is about footage his grandfather shot in another Jewish community in 1938, said “these will be the only moving images” ever taken of the people of Mykolaiv.

“Even a second or two of someone gesturing or talking or motioning toward the camera is a precious record of a distinctive life,” he said in an email.

One day this summer at the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/05/08/holocaust-museum-gets-center-to-house-memories-of-a-nightmare/" target=_blank>Holocaust Museum’s Shapell conservation center</a> in Bowie, Md., Swift put on a pair of white gloves and took the reel of Harry Roher’s film from its yellow container. She carefully pulled off a strip of film to examine it.

“So this looks like it’s really in pretty good shape,” she said.

She said it looked like the film was made up of several bits spliced together. She was not sure how long it was in feet.

“It’s important to see them as normal people, having normal lives,” she said, because “you know what’s going to happen.”

The German army reached the area around Lviv in summer 1941, a few weeks after Adolf Hitler’s Nazi forces invaded the Soviet Union during World War II, according to the Holocaust Museum’s Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos.

The Nazis, and many local citizens, were fueled by virulent antisemitism and eager to kill as many Jews as possible, as fast as possible.

Outside Lviv, there were two towns named Mykolaiv, about 20 miles apart.

Both had many Jewish residents. But Roher’s hometown was called “the Jewish Mykolayiv” because half the population was Jewish, according to a 1996 memoir by the late Aaron Schwadron, who had left the town right before the war.

Oppression began as soon as the Germans arrived in the area. Property was seized. Money was extorted. People were rounded up and forced into slave labor gangs. Many were brutalized by sadistic Nazi soldiers or shot dead.

In the Jewish Mykolaiv, “all the elderly were gathered, including my father,” and were sent to a nearby village, Schwadron wrote.

“They were forced to dig their own graves and then stood there while the Nazi machine-guns killed them one by one,” he wrote. “The Germans did not even bother to cover the graves. Only the horrible smell of the victims forced the people of the village to cover the graves after a few days.”

Others from Mykolaiv were gassed in the Belzec death camp, according to a Holocaust database in Israel’s Yad Vashem remembrance center. They included Sumer Blaich, who was about 27 and appeared briefly in Harry Roher’s film. He was identified by Schwadron.

In Belzec, people were murdered in gas chambers with carbon monoxide from a diesel engine, author Martin Gilbert wrote in his 1985 history of the Holocaust in Europe. Of the roughly 600,000 people eventually sent to Belzec, only two are believed to have survived, Gilbert wrote.

But that horror was still in the future as Harry Roher puffed his cigars, ran his camera in Mykolaiv and tried to get everybody he could on film.

Near the end of the footage, he can be seen urging another group of villagers to walk to the camera. He steers the people toward the lens and then, with a jaunty wave, disappears from the frame.

Part of the Washington Post team that won the Pulitzer Prize in 2022 for coverage of the January 6 riot. 

Part of the Washington Post team that won he Pulitzer Prize in 2008 for coverage of the Virginia Tech shooting. 

Finalist for the Ernie Pyle award in 1988 at the Philadelphia Inquirer.

With Sari Horwitz: Sniper: Inside the Hunt for the Killers Who Terrorized the Nation. 

Villanova University, BA and MA in history

Nieman fellow, Harvard University

Michael E. Ruane is a general assignment reporter who also covers Washington institutions and historical topics. He has been a general assignment reporter at the Philadelphia Bulletin, an urban affairs and state feature writer at the Philadelphia Inquirer, and a Pentagon correspondent at Knight Ridder newspapers.

Michael Ruane

washpost

Rare film of rural Jewish life, before it was crushed by the Nazis. 

the-washington-post

Film made before World War II and the Holocaust donated to the USHMM

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, gift of Melanie Roher

Nazis slaughtered scores of Jews in rural Poland. // Rare video shows their life before the horror.

Rare home movies show rural Jewish life before the Holocaust

The footage, which has been donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, captured images of a man’s doomed neighbors in Poland