[Ger-Poland-Volhynia] Planning to travel to East Poland

[Bert Treichel]

Re the above recent Mail List posting, my son, my wife and I  travelled to visit ancestral farm sites in East Poland about 10 years ago. I share our experience as follows, which hopefully provides some limited help.
We flew to Cracow and after a very interesting one day tour of Cracow we rented a car there and made a long one day trip to see my parents' former family farm sites at the neighboring villages of Lowcza and Tomaszowka about 20 miles north of Chelm. We used no guide, know no Polish  and had no problems on this short stay but our son was a seasoned world traveller.  For our overnight stays in Cracow, the hotel, restaurant and car rental staff there could converse in English. Hamburgers at a Macdonalds in Lublin were ordered by pointing at the menu. The roads to East Poland were quite good but rather slow due to proliferation of bicycles, farm equipment, farm trucks, carts etc.; so our return to Cracow took us until the wee hours. I believe I recall that we purchased some zlotys (the then Polish currency) in Canada and that an ATM card to be used in Europe was restricted to a 4 character password.
Fortunately we had in Canada purchased a good Poland road map, we had a good local detailed-scale map (1:50,000?)prepared by US army during WW2, that even showed buildings and we had good descriptions of the farm sites' locations from aged relatives who had lived near there and we were able to find the sites without guidance or need for a translator. The farm buildings and villages had been completely destroyed/burned during the Nazi attack on Poland in September, 1939, while my then still-resident-there grandparents hid in a crude farm bunker. Only small brick shards were found in a corn field at the former farm house site. In requesting permission from the current farm owner to take photos, at first we drew a blank due to language but eventually we were able to communicate somewhat with the farmer's wife who knew some German.
Re relevant SGGEE Journal articles, my parent's life in the area and WW1 exile to Siberia is documented in the first and second articles ("From Poland to Manitoba" and "Spinning a Line") in the Sept. 2007 SGGEE Journal. 
We pretty much drew a blank on our short quick visit to likely ancestral cemeteries, as the local German cemetery just SE of Tomaszowka was in total neglect in a now heavily forested area and I would assume wooden  grave markers had probably been used and would be rotted away by now. 
In our short few hour stay there we visted little else but enjoyed the drive through the pleasant rural farm country side; I swear I could smell sauerkraut fermenting in passing through some villages!
Shivers still run through my spine in reading about and passing the nearby WW2 Concentration Camp sites at Sobibor and Majdanek, which are described in www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org.
Our vist to my ancestral farm sites with the now bombed/artillery destroyed ruins had quite an impact on me which remains with me still.
Please free to contact me at albert.treichel at sympatico.ca if any questions re our short visit there.

Albert Treichel
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada