Zdro Films II, Disc 1, Scene 2: Invasion of Poland, September, 1939

Some of us have fond memories of this item of furniture.

Glorioski!  It's Gene & Clara's bar cabinet!  Let's look inside.

We want that grey metal case.

This is JPZ's film case.

The leftmost film, in the brown can, is of Orchard Lake in 1941.  We want the second one.

It's a commercially-produced film for home projection.  Specifically, it is a Castle Films newsreel.

JPZ typed labels and affixed them to the inside of the film can top.

This film is up on Tye's Youtube channel.  Thanks, Tye! It is also on the DVDs sent out some time ago.

From Scene 1, Orchard Lake, 1941, we move back in time two years.  (That's my fault; that reflects the order in which I gave the film cans to the conversion pros.)  In September 1939 EJZ was starting his junior year in high school. 

How old was Casimir at that time?

Clara Matynka was just starting fifth grade.

There is a good Wikipedia article, with links, on Castle Films.  It was a home-movie company founded in 1924.  Its first commercial offering was a film on the Hindenberg explosion.

JPZ bought the Castle  "Invasion of Poland" film and added it to his collection.  His collection, by the way, also included boxing, demolition derby, and Donald Duck.

16:22  "Danzig"??  So in 1939 an American newsreel called Gdansk "Danzig."  

16:40  Ethnic Germans trudging either east or west, to Germany.  The corridor of land within Poland that went south from Gdansk was about 90 miles wide.  Wikipedia has good maps, photos, and writeup of "Poland 1939."

18:00  Appeasement did not work, did it?

18:51  Here's von Ribbentrop getting into his plane to fly to Moscow to sign the nonaggression pact.  We can see him then leaning forward to look out his airplane window.

19:00  Stalin and von Ribbentrop on the balcony of the Kremlin.

19:24 Of the three in top hats walking along, is that Daladier in the middle?

20:33  On this simple but to-the-point map, we can see the narrow Danzig Corridor, with Pomerania to the west and East Prussia to the east.

21:18  How did the news services get that batttle footage in 1939?  For example the view down the bomb bay of the German bombers?  Did the Germans release that intentionally?  Was that their idea of news or of a public relations effort?

21:31  George VI.  The real one.

21:54  "Rappel Immédiat!"    "Immediate recall!"

22:40  Is this a film montage to suggest or represent the torpedoing of SS Athenia?  Are parts of it film released to news outfits by the Reich?  If they did that, did they think that such scenes would paralyze us with fear?  I did read that Hitler assumed for a very long time that the US would not enter into war against Germany.

24:59 They had no tanks.  They made the last cavalry charge in world history.

Andrzej Wajda's film Lotna I recommend very highly.

Zdro Films II, Disc 1, Scene 1: Orchard Lake, Michigan, 1941 - Corrected Post

Eugene Zdrojewski's high-school athletics patch.  13.5mm by barely 1mm.  Red felt cutout applied to buff felt.

The film we discuss here is up on Tye's Youtube channel, here.  Thanks, Tye!

There is more on the background to this film here.

The link to this and to all the films will be on the right sidebar of the G&C website.

All the films have the same detailed names on the Youtube channel and on the DVDs sent out some time ago.



Zdro Films II starts off in a celebratory way, with a trip by Great Lakes passenger liner to Michigan, en route to Orchard Lake Seminary.

Dim the lights - flip the switch - Where's my glass?

Three travelers:  JPZ, Eleanor, and who is the third?  That is, who is the woman with brown hair done up in a white knitted snood?

At 0:29 she is sitting on a bench on deck, with Eleanor.  She's pretty chummy with Eleanor.  Is she a Kotwas?

Correction: The lady is Julia Mostkowska Zdrojewska, mother of Eugene and Casimir.  The other lady is her younger sister, Olivia, "Auntie Ollie."

2:00 Nice shoulder pads on the 1941 women's suit tailoring.

Where is Orchard Lake, Michigan?  Ah, here.

2:16  JPZ has handed over the camera to the young lady;  here are JPZ and Eleanor in the frame. Nice lifeboat.

Correction: Julia.

JPZ is wearing a boater.  How appropriate!  Oh, I love this.

2:34  Oh my - Detroit.  A city that is now largely wrecked and partly turned into garden patches.

2:53  I wonder if that is Henry Ford.  I mean a statue of Henry Ford. 

3:45  That horrible monumentalist architectural style, beloved of all dictators of the 1930s, turns up here on some Catholic monument?  Did the world go completely crazy mid-century?

6:04 Okay there's Dad:  Eugene John Zdrojewski as a high-school senior, I conclude.  He graduated high school in 1941.  He did his first two years of college also at Orchard Lake.  He was drafted into the Army in 1943.  

If you play the sequence from 6:04 in slow motion, with EJZ and the two ladies walking along, you can see him gesturing with his hands and turning his head as he speaks.  His manner is so strikingly characteristic.  Where's my Kleenex?

And the stride looks familiar: it's the stride of a sailor on land . . . or wait . . . a priest navigating around while wearing a cassock.  Heavy skirts make for that slowly rolling gait.  How about that theory?  After all, he was surrounded by priests and nuns, all with the gait.  Who could avoid subconscious imitation?

6:23 Mystery Lady is wearing Spectator shoes.  Aren't they gorgeous?

Correction: Auntie Ollie was a stylish woman, all her life.  She also had a terrific sense of humor.

7:38  EJZ in quarter-profile.  Andrew looks quite a bit like him, doesn't he?

8:05 What's with the sow and piglets all of a sudden?  The Zdrojewski family must have strong agrarian roots, that's all.

9:18 That tan building looks like a dorm, doesn't it?  There were 8 boys in his class.  Did the cooks really put saltpeter into the oatmeal to dampen the adolescent longings?  Or is that just a story people love to tell?

9:45 They must be proceeding in alphabetical order.  Great place, end of the line.  Right?

10:30 Genie brandishes his high-school diploma.  And somewhere in these movies, Johnny does the exact same thing, but in a white jacket.  And somewhere in the photo collection, Casimir brandishes his diploma with a similar great big smile.  I'll have to find those and put them up.

11:23  Wow!  A windmill! Just like Chrosno!

11:45  What are we touring now?  Ford's birthplace? 

12:11 Statues rolling out to ring the bells in the bell tower!  This is great!  It says "?????-BENNETT" above the arch.  Is this building a train station?

12:52  Spectator shoes again, in case you missed them the first time.  Great styles in the forties: feminine, yet fitted and tailored suits and coats, with those notched lapels.  Very lively and sharp-looking. Was it the influence of all the military uniforms around?

13:15  See how in the display of little Ford automobiles in the Ford Rotunda, "Alaska" of course has its own section, separate from the United States.  It looks strange to us time-travellers, but Alaska Statehood was 8 years in the future.

13:30s  As our gent with the boater gazes at the correctly-rotating and accurately-tilted model planet, we notice that the balustrade has giant pink "V8" motifs.  It can't be the vegetable juice referenced here.  So Ford invented the V8 engine?  Who knew?

Clever of JPZ to finish the sequence with a shot of summer fun in summertime waters.

School's out!

More on the European "Official Papers," and Chrosno

Jim Ehrlich's comment on the post of April 18, 2011 included his translation of the essential terms in the identity papers ("Abzugsattest," "departure certificate") of that time that have come down in our family.

Victoria's birthplace ("Geburtsdort") is given as "Chrosno," which is a village.

Ludwig's birthplace is given as "Leng," which was an estate.

Both Chrosno and Leng were listed as within a political unit equivalent to a county or a shire, ("Kreis," circle) known as "Strzelno."

The Kreis of course no longer exists, but the village of Strzelno certainly exists.

Jim posted a Google map with the villages of Chrosno and Strzelno.  They are in the north of Poland, between Posnan and Warsaw.

Click on the image to enlarge it.

Strzelno village square, from its Wikipedia article

The Polish Wikipedia article on Chrosno has this terrific photo of a nineteenth-century windmill.  Google Images has more.

Leng is called on the Abzugsattest a "Gutzbezirk," an estate or manor.  We still can not find it on maps, nor can we find any other references to it as a place name.  So that challenge remains wide open, as does the challenge to find the original document, the Abzugsattest.

Many of the towns and villages on the Polish central plains were invaded first by the Soviets in 1939, then by the Germans in 1941, then by the Soviets again in 1944-45.  There are memoirs of prisoners who were force-marched east or west three times.  I wonder if there is anything left of the estate house at Leng.  

A Cozy-looking Zdrojewski Group

This photo was in a box upstairs.  What a cozy-looking house; I can almost smell the gingerbread.
Let's zoom in on the people.

Eleanor is second from the right.  Who are the other people?  Whose house is it?

Who is this, if not John Peter Zdrojewski, the young man?

This photo came to me directly from May Street, via Marilla.  It is similar to the one Paul Zadner sent me, and which is in an earlier post.  He thought that this was John Peter Zdrojewski.  But John, son of JPZ, says that it is not JPZ.  So, who is it?    There were a set of similar photos, perhaps taken at a studio, perhaps at high-school graduation time.

The date written in the lower right corner is "5-6-1921."

EDIT of 02/28/2019:  The phot above is of John Peter Zdrojewski.  The evidence for this confident conclusion is a wedding photograph labeled with names, which we examined and considered in the post Who is this Mystery Girl . . .

Since JPZ looks quite the same in the above portrait as he does in the name-labeled wedding portrait, we can conclude, in proper syllogistic fashion, that the wedding of JPZ and Julia Mostkowska took place in 1921.  

See how he knotted his tie, with the necessary out-pook just below the knot?  Absolutely classic!


Related post:  Who is this Beautiful Girl . . .