In 2009, Glenn Kurtz discovered long-forgotten footage, taken by his grandfather, in a closet in his parent’s home. Stored in an aluminum can for 70 years, the film had deteriorated to the point of being almost unrecoverable. Kurtz managed to preserve three minutes of his grandfather’s silent home movie, which captures a 1938 summer trip to his hometown of Nasielsk in Poland. In 2014, Kurtz published a book about what he had learned through careful study of the film; for five years, he had assiduously examined details of the synagogue, the street, and the faces of the children playing. Kurtz also tells the stories of other survivors who helped him piece together the history of Nasielk’s Jewish community. Kurtz’s research is now the subject of a new documentary titled Three Minutes—A Lengthening, directed by the historian Bianca Stigter. As Kurtz writes, the film “asks one question over and over: ‘What do we see?’”

At the time [of my grandfather’s visit]—one year before the out­break of World War II—Nasiel­sk was home to a Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty of about 3,000 peo­ple, rough­ly half the town’s pop­u­la­tion; few­er than 100 of Nasielsk’s Jews would sur­vive the Shoah. My grandfather’s three min­utes of film are the only known mov­ing images of this co­mmuni­ty pri­or to its destruction.

When I dis­cov­ered the film, how­ev­er, I knew noth­ing about it. I nev­er met my grand­fa­ther, who died before I was born, and my grand­moth­er, although she lived well into her nineties, nev­er spoke of their 1938 trip to Europe. I didn’t know why they went to Poland or what they did dur­ing their vis­it. I didn’t know what small Pol­ish town appeared in the film or the iden­ti­ties of any of the people.

My grandfather’s film is thus silent in more ways than one. There is no audio, and so we do not hear the con­ver­sa­tions or the com­mo­tion sur­round­ing him as he panned his cam­era across the crowd­ed mar­ket square. The film is also silent in a larg­er sense: it does not tell us what it is. The images are innocu­ous. Their poignance and pow­er are evi­dent only when we know the his­tor­i­cal fact that these peo­ple would soon be vic­tims of geno­cide. But just because we see these peo­ple does not mean we know them. And just because we know what hap­pened to them does not mean we know any­thing about their lives.

Yesterday, Israel’s Channel 12 reported that Israeli representatives have been involved in secret talks, brokered by the United Arab Emirates, with their Syrian counterparts about the potential establishment of diplomatic relations between their countries. Even more surprisingly, on Wednesday an Israeli reporter spoke with a senior official from Syria’s information ministry, Ali al-Rifai. The prospect of a member of the Syrian government, or even a private citizen, giving an on-the-record interview to an Israeli journalist was simply unthinkable under the old regime. What’s more, his message was that Damascus seeks peace with other countries in the region, Israel included.

These developments alone should make Israelis sanguine about Donald Trump’s overtures to Syria’s new rulers. Yet the interim president Ahmed al-Sharaa’s jihadist resumé, his connections with Turkey and Qatar, and brutal attacks on minorities by forces aligned with, or part of, his regime remain reasons for skepticism. While recognizing these concerns, Noah Rothman nonetheless makes the case for optimism:

The old Syrian regime was an incubator and exporter of terrorism, as well as an Iranian vassal state. The Assad regime trained, funded, and introduced terrorists into Iraq intent on killing American soldiers. It hosted Iranian terrorist proxies as well as the Russian military and its mercenary cutouts. It was contemptuous of U.S.-backed proscriptions on the use of chemical weapons on the battlefield, necessitating American military intervention—an unavoidable outcome, clearly, given Barack Obama’s desperate efforts to avoid it. It incubated Islamic State as a counterweight against the Western-oriented rebel groups vying to tear that regime down, going so far as to purchase its own oil from the nascent Islamist group.

The Assad regime was an enemy of the United States. The Sharaa regime could yet be a friend to America. . . . Insofar as geopolitics is a zero-sum game, taking Syria off the board for Russia and Iran and adding it to the collection of Western assets would be a triumph. At the very least, it’s worth a shot. Trump deserves credit for taking it.