On the Road to Halicz

Curiosity propelled the author to visit Poland and the Ukraine and to tracking down Halicz, his father’s birthplace. What are these places today after their earth overturned and churned it’s people up in these blood-soaked lands of Eastern Europe? Swedish invaders, the Russian Czars, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, murderous Russian and German occupations and the stupefying Soviet system system, all left their mark on these lands to this very day. It is reflected in the cultures, ancient animosities, every day attitudes and fostered by local bureaucracies in an ever-growing mix of some mindless rules and regulations that do not always match the official strive ‘to become democratic.’ Borders shifted from East to West, transporting millions from their ancestral homes, some to strange lands, some to factories of death, never to be seen again. The author takes the reader along an explorative path, following a triangular laid-out route that started and ended in Warsaw. It went to Lviv, at one time in eastern Poland, currently in western Ukraine. Then he trailed across the Galicia region east to west through Southern Poland, to Cracow, the marvelous old Polish royal city in the very proximity of Auschwitz, the center of the killing fields of Poland and back again to Warsaw. The book invites the reader to meet and connect with the characters and places, as well as with the picturesque landscape and its history as if he was present on this voyage of the unexpected. These people and their ancestors, in their village hovels and Ghettos witnessed and experienced the worst of war in its utmost brutality. It is from where thousands of Jews in the 19th century kept Ellis Island busy, already then fleeing for their lives. Yet it was encouraging to see the resurgence of the masses of young people, educated, enjoying their lives. Flowers bloom, grass sprouts, babies play and life covers up the soil on which unspoken deeds were done. Poland and the Ukraine are places where one cannot disregard anything, rather one must regard everything. It indeed is a journey to another planet that is both beautiful and horrifying. Read more