FRONTLINE travels back in time to a family shtetl with producer Marian Marzynski, who escaped the Warsaw ghetto as a child.
The remarkable three-hour documentary tells the homecoming story of two elderly Polish-American Jews who return to their families’ shtetl in Bransk, Poland, where 2,500 Jews lived before most were sent to Treblinka’s gas chambers. These two Americans are aided in their journey by a Polish Gentile, who has restored Bransk’s Jewish cemetery and researched the lives of the Jews who once lived there. The film captures these pilgrims as they face old neighbors, some who were betrayers, others who were saviors to the Jews of Bransk.