MUSEUM SURPRISE

NYer stunned at pre-Holocaust film of family

An Upper East Side woman recently got the surprise of her life at a Manhattan museum — seeing her family’s longforgotten home movies projected for all to see.

Retired college professor Amy Rosenblum strolled into the Museum of the City of New York to check out Letters to Afar, an art installation chronicling home movies of JewishAmerican immigrants traveling in the 1920s and ’30s.

And then, to her immense surprise, motion pictures of Rosenblum’s parents appeared on the museum’s screens and walls.

“I gasped, I was so surprised,” Rosenblum, 78, told The Post. “I was very moved and then I looked straight ahead and there was this film. That was very overwhelming.”

The footage that so stunned Rosenblum was actually quite familiar to her: home movies shot by her dad, Gerold Frank, in 1934 during a visit to the family’s ancestral home in Poland.

Rosenblum and her brother John Frank donated that footage to a Jewish researcher in about 2000, and hadn’t given a second thought to the movies until last month.

Gerold Frank, a writer best known for his biography on Judy Garland, was born in America, but much of his family — and the rela tives of his wife, Lillian (far left, in Eastern Europe in 1934; and near left, in 2010) — lived in Poland.

So in 1934, they traveled to Poland armed with their new toy, a 16mm camera.

The home movies were shot for family entertainment, but turned out to be a solemn historical record of loved ones lost to the Holocaust a decade later.

“I got very teary” seeing the footage again, said Rosenblum, an Upper West Side native who taught social work at Virginia Commonwealth University.

“It was a family film and what it represented was so much loss.”

Letters to Afar, made by Hungarian filmmaker Péter Forgács with archives from the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, cap tured a poignant moment of JewishAmerican history.

By the 1930s, waves of immigrants had etched out middleclass lives in America and had the wherewithal to visit the old country.

Their travels and home movies captured seemingly optimistic times, which preceded the darkest days of 20th century mankind.

“Everybody was so well dressed, looking their best. You don’t have a feeling of stress, you don’t see stress [in the footage],” said museum director Susan Henshaw Jones.

“It’s like watching a Hitchcock movie. We know what’s going to happen, Hitchcock knows what was going to happen — but, of course, the people in the movies had no idea what was going to happen.”