Visiting your past

This god damn time flies. Almost half a year already passed since Christmas. Although it was supposed to be a calm year it seems we managed to spin it out of control. I would call it business as usual. This is anyhow not what I intended to write about.

Some weeks ago we decided to find the roots of my family - at least to certain extent. From my fathers side I have sort of Eastern roots. His family comes from the part of Poland that now belongs to Ukraine. This kind of skewed my personality though I never managed to acquire the Eastern Polish accent from my grandfather. I was shocked to discover at some point tof my life that central Poland Poles are eating potato pancakes with sugar as opposed to salt, cream and garlic as we always did at home...

My grandfather turned 88 this year so I decided that it is the last opportunity to show us where he comes from. He has never been to his village since the end of the second world war... So we took him and my dad and off we went for a longer weekend...The part of Ukraine we visited is God damn poor...people on the fields seem to be doing industrial agriculture by hand even on such days as 1st of May (national holiday in most parts of Europe). Lviv was great and full of young people eager to have fun. We must go there again...

Anyway we found the village. We found the church. We met people in front of the church who had no problems showing us where my grandfather's family lived. He himself was a bit confused since things did change...We found the house - and went in. There I saw the same grapes growing as on my grandfathers summer garden... and understood why he always wants to have wallnut trees (the village was full of it). The old lady leaving there shared the same misery as my grandfather. The only difference is that she was repatriated from Poland (as a Ukrainian) to this nowadays Ukrainian village. She was misarable and very unhappy about her life and what happened to her family...

We also visited the cemetery in the village where suddenly my grandfather exclaimed - oh this is where the colony was... I wondered what kind of colony he is talking about. He then went on how Polish government during the time of between the two world wars was sending hundreds of his citizens to colonize the area. Obviously I have never heard about it in Poland. According to our version of history we have never done such things :)))

We made it back - it was great - though somehow my grandfather used so much energy for this trip that he had to spend the whole week afterwards in the hospital. But he is doing fine...At least he showed us something I really wanted to see.