‘It was shot from the perspective of occupiers and perpetrators, and was used for anti-Semitic propaganda purposes.

‘The footage that appears in my documentary was shot by a Pole, with a completely different perspective.

‘This is the first known non-Nazi, non-propaganda footage from the Warsaw Ghetto.’

Despite its value the film had languished in Ziolkowski’s family archives for decades until Bednarski managed to obtain it.

Screened for the first time this month at the documentary festival Millennium Docs Against Gravity in the Polish capital, the film shows everyday life in the ghetto.

‘We see crowds of people on the street. We see partially destroyed buildings,’ said Bednarski, who began work on the movie 15 years ago after film school.

‘We see children smuggling food from the Aryan side, as it was called, to the Jewish side. Desperate children who were starving, who were pushing food through a hole in the wall,’ he said.

A year after invading Poland in September 1939, the Nazi Germans created a special district in the capital for 480,000 Jews.

Many would die from hunger or disease in the ghetto, while 300,000 would be sent to the Treblinka death camp to be gassed.

In 1941, Ziolkowski was 30 years old. An amateur filmmaker, motorcycle racer and merchant before the war, he managed to obtain a pass into the ghetto.

There, he risked his life by documenting what he saw.

This was still before the terrifying scenes of the ghetto in its final phase when the streets were littered with bodies on the eve of its 1943 liquidation.

But already the sight of a lifeless body on a sidewalk full of elegantly clad passersby gives a sense of the tragedy to come.

Some of the footage was shot covertly from a car. But Bednarski is convinced that other scenes must have been filmed out in the open as people look right into the camera and appear to know they are being filmed.

‘I like to think he [Ziolkowski] did what he did to document the horror that was unfolding in the city in which he was living,’ said Mr Bednarski.

‘He clearly chose locations for their significance. This was not accidental random filming.

‘He had shot home movies before the Second World War, so he was able to use an 8mm camera,’ said Mr Bednarski.

‘But as a Polish motorcycle racing champion of the 1930s, he was clearly someone who liked to take risks.’

Warsaw ghetto survivors who were shown the footage have said they recognise some of the scenes but could not identify any of the people.

‘How lucky that the film was preserved, that the Ziolkowski family kept it and it didn’t end up in the trash,’ said Warsaw teacher Kaja Rupocinska, who attended the film screening.

‘Did he want to document the war? Did he go there out of curiosity? Could he tell that an unprecedented tragedy was about to happen?’, she asked AFP.

‘We don’t know and we’ll never know. One thing is certain: what he did was invaluable.’

Previous footage of the Warsaw Ghetto was published by Jewish filmmaker Yael Hersonski as part of her documentary A Film Unfinished about life in the ghetto.

But for her source material, she was forced to draw on footage recorded by a Nazi film crew as part of propaganda before the ghetto was eliminated.

While it was never released in Germany during Hitler’s rule, the fact that the film was shot at his regime’s behest makes it an unreliable historical record.

For a glimpse into daily life inside the ghetto, historians largely rely upon the Oyneg Shabes – an archive buried inside time capsules shortly before the ghetto was wiped off the map.

The archive comprises some 35,000 pages – including documents, materials from the underground press, photographs, memoirs, belles lettres, labels from ration packs and more.

However, it does not contain any footage of the ghetto – which makes Ziolkowski’s record all the more valuable.

Shot by amateur Polish filmmaker Alfons Ziolkowski, the 10-minute raw footage languished in the man’s family for decades before Bednarski managed to obtain it through relatives.

Screened for the first time this month at the documentary festival Millennium Docs Against Gravity in the Polish capital, the film shows everyday life in the ghetto.

“We see crowds of people on the street. We see partially destroyed buildings,” said Bednarski, who began work on the movie 15 years ago after film school.

“We see children smuggling food from the Aryan side, as it was called, to the Jewish side. Desperate children who were starving, who were pushing food through a hole in the wall,” he told AFP.

A year after invading Poland in September 1939, the Nazi Germans created a special district in the capital for 480,000 Jews.

Many would die from hunger or disease in the ghetto, while 300,000 would be sent to the Treblinka death camp to be gassed.

– Risked his life –

In 1941, Ziolkowski was 30 years old. An amateur filmmaker, motorcycle racer and merchant before the war, he managed to obtain a pass into the ghetto.

There, he risked his life by documenting what he saw.

This was still before the terrifying scenes of the ghetto in its final phase when the streets were littered with bodies on the eve of its 1943 liquidation.

But already the sight of a lifeless body on a sidewalk full of elegantly clad passersby gives a sense of the tragedy to come.

Some of the footage was shot covertly from a car. But other scenes must have been filmed out in the open as people look right into the camera and appear to know they are being filmed by Ziolkowski, according to Bednarski.

“I think if he’d been caught, he would have been arrested, at the very least. He might have been shot,” Bednarski added.

Warsaw ghetto survivors who were shown the footage have said they recognise some of the scenes but could not identify any of the people.

“How lucky that the film was preserved, that the Ziolkowski family kept it and it didn’t end up in the trash,” said Warsaw teacher Kaja Rupocinska, who attended the film screening.

“Did he want to document the war? Did he go there out of curiosity? Could he tell that an unprecedented tragedy was about to happen?”, she asked AFP.

“We don’t know and we’ll never know. One thing is certain: what he did was invaluable.”

The author of the 10-minute film was Alfons Ziółkowski, a Pole who was a champion motorcycle racer before the war and also an avid amateur filmmaker. Between March and November 1941, the 30-year-old used his special access to the ghetto to film that part of the city, which was usually off-limits to non-Jews. If he had been caught filming by the Germans, he would have been at risk of arrest, being sent to a concentration camp or even death.

Ziółkowsk captured on 8mm film the growing horror of the largest ghetto in German-occupied Europe. It shows police stations at the entrance to the ghetto, Jewish children smuggling food, a policeman beating one of them, and the junction of Żelazna and Chłodna Streets before the famous wooden footbridge was built there. At times, Ziółkowski appears to be filming secretly, while at other times residents of the ghetto are aware that they are being filmed.

The film features in a new documentary film ‘Warsaw: A City Divided’ made by award-winning Polish-Canadian filmmaker Eric Bednarski. However, some mystery about the film and Ziółkowski, who died in the 1980s, remains.

Bednarski told TFN: “Basically I know very little about Ziółkowski. I wish I knew more! As far as I know, all of his films remained with him and his family after the war.

“He was an 8mm film enthusiast who shot quite a few films before the war. In the later stages of the war he was also in Warsaw. It was from his Polish descendants that I was able to get permission to use the film.”

For Bednarski, the film, which he obtained in 2004, became a pretext for his 70-minute documentary about the creation of the ghetto, its construction, as well as its memory and influence on present-day Warsaw.

“Having found this unique archival material, I felt obliged and responsible to share it with others. But in order to do so, I wanted to dress it in a broader historical and urban context, as well as refer to contemporary Warsaw, which we travel around every day,” Bednarski said.

The documentary shows Warsaw as a thriving modern city but one that is still coming to terms with a traumatic period of its history. It uses material from the past with glimpses of present-day Warsaw, both its human face and its urban fabric.

The filmmaker spent years researching to put Ziółkowski’s film into the right context. Film and photography experts spent countless hours identifying the present-day locations of the scenes in the 8mm footage by analysing individual frames.

The authenticity of the archival footage was confirmed by experts from the Yad Vashem Institute in Jerusalem as well as by specialists from the Polish National Film Archive, the BBC and the Imperial War Museum in London.

Pre-war Warsaw was inhabited by over a million people, including almost 400,000 Jews. The ghetto, which was forcibly created by the Germans, became a prison for almost 450,000 Jews from Poland and other European countries. Almost all of them died in the Holocaust. Most of them were murdered in the extermination camp that the Germans designed, built and operated in Treblinka.

The premiere of ‘Warsaw: A City Divided’ will take place on May 11th in Warsaw at the 16th Millennium Docs Against Gravity Film Festival.