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

[Joyce Guasch]

Thank you all for your help and suggestions. You've all been very helpful.
Once the holidays are behind us, I will have additional questions and may
post again and/or write to some of you individually with my questions. 

For what we needed to know now, you've answered those questions. 

Joyce Guasch

-----Original Message-----
From: ger-poland-volhynia-bounces at eclipse.sggee.org
[mailto:ger-poland-volhynia-bounces at eclipse.sggee.org] On Behalf Of Bert
Treichel
Sent: Wednesday, November 07, 2012 6:53 PM
To: ger-poland-volhynia at eclipse.sggee.org
Subject: [Ger-Poland-Volhynia] Planning to travel to East Poland

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
_______________________________________________
Ger-Poland-Volhynia Mailing List hosted by Society for German Genealogy in
Eastern Europe http://www.sggee.org Mailing list info at
http://www.sggee.org/communicate/mailing_list