Barszcz – similar to borscht where the main ingredient is beetroot

Pierogies – potato dough dumplings similar to a giant ravioli

• Meat-Mięso
• Cheese-Ser
• Potato-Ziemnieki
• Saurkraut-kiszone or kapuste
• Mushroom-Grzyby
• Cherry-wisnie
• Ruskie-potato and cheese filled

Naleśniki – thin pancakes that are usually stuffed with curd, fruit, or a variety of other ingredients (we have always known these as blintzes)

Bigos – stew of cabbage and sausage

Gołąbki – stuffed cabbage leaves rolled around a mixture of ground beef, rice and spices

Placki ziemniaczane – potato pancakes, grated or minced, flattened and deep fried

Kopytka – small potato flour dumplings

Kiełbasa – polish sausage

Kompot - warm, red juice with fruit floating in it

Helpful link – This site,  http://www.staypoland.com/poland-food.htm, includes a list and explanation of Polish food.  Enjoy!

To get to this area of southeast Poland, we decided to rent a car.  We could have made the trip without one, but our ability to see the sparsely populated region would have been limited.  The two hour drive from Krakow took us through village after village, most of which looked the same as the last.  We finally arrived in Jaslo, the closest town to Przysieki, to find a place to stay.  We settled into a nice, cheap hotel and set off to explore the area.

Independent of the search for distant relatives, southeast Poland struck us as an unknown jewel for travel.  We stopped a number of times through the town of Krosno, recommended to us by a friend of Deenaree’s who lived there for a year.  We were rewarded with a cute, small old town with medieval architecture to rival Krakow, albeit on a much smaller scale.  Another town near Jaslo, Biecz, boasted a similar old town with gorgeous cathedrals, houses and city walls around the main square.

As we continued to drive from place to place, we started to realize we were seeing big, brown road signs and unpainted wooden steeples everywhere.  As we drove out of Biecz, we decided to follow one of those brown signs a few kilometers off the main road and see what we found.  What luck, we happened to stumble across one of a handful of wooden churches in Poland that is on the UNESCO World Heritage List.  We arrived just as they were ready to close and were glad we did.  The inside walls of the church treated us to a collection of awe-inspiring paintings from the 13th century that rival anything we have seen across the world over the past 10 months.  What’s more, the kind woman in the office provided us with awesome maps and brochures about the region, detailing the countless wooden churches in the area.  We spent half a day driving around, taking in the majesty of the traditional houses of worship.

Finally, we spent some time in Przysieki.  We soon realized it was not the kind of place where it would be easy to show up unannounced and find a third cousin.  The village lacked any center to speak of and had no more than a single small church, convenience store, train station and restaurant.  The town was much closer to a collection of houses in the countryside than an actual village.  Nonetheless, we ate dinner at the restaurant and talked to the owner.  Plenty of Golens can be found in Poland, he seemed to suggest and it was probably impossible to find anything with our only clue.

We drove through the place, took photos and paid special attention to the oldest looking houses, wondering if my great-grandfather may have played with a friend in that place, or fetched some sugar from a neighbor or maybe even lived there.  We stopped at the train station and wondered whether he left from that spot for the faraway city of Antwerp, just a step on his great journey to the far off promise land of America.  Whether or not we saw places that Adam Golen lived or played or departed from, we saw his country.  It is a beautiful area with rolling countryside and ornate churches, thick forests and charming old towns.  We weren’t able to fill in all of those missing links, but now we know where the whole chain began.

It has been a heavy set of days in Poland.  We don’t have to look very far to be reminded of what happened here during World War II.  In Lublin (our first Polish city), a large castle on the hill of the city greets us as we disembark from the bus.  We learn immediately that the castle’s gates were where hundreds of Lublin Jews were herded on their way to trains that would lead them to death camps all around the country.  We also learn that this castle used to be a prison and hundreds of people were massacred here during the last days of war.  While we were in Lublin, we decide to visit a concentration camp called Majdanek which is a few miles away.  It is a sobering experience to see the barbed wire fences and guard towers up close.  We stand in former gas chambers and crematoriums.  We stare at empty Zyklon B canisters and walk in a room surrounded by heaps and heaps of shoes.  We look at a memorial that consists of a large hill of ashes.  We don’t know what to think.

In Warsaw, we learn that the city is a miracle in and of itself.  Hitler was in a rage at news of the Warsaw Uprising and took it out on the city by having troops level it to the ground.  We spend most of a day walking through the Warsaw Rising Museum learning about an underground resistance movement that fought for Warsaw’s independence and died, with no assistance from allies as they had hoped.  The entrance to the museum has a quote that they owe their freedom to no one and the tribute to these fighters is outstanding.  We find a street that contains the last two original ghetto buildings in Warsaw and we look at the poster sized photos of the original inhabitants plastered over their windows.  We see young ladies, rabbis, couples, and small children happily poised…frozen in time.

Finally, we arrive in Krakow.  The city managed to survive the war more intact than many of its neighbors and it shows in the traditional Jewish neighborhoods that still exist today.  It is eerie to walk through them, in the paths of families that walked the same route, all of their earth goods in hand, on their way to ghettos and boxcars.  It was this ghetto’s liquidation, as shown in Stephen Spielberg’s, Schindler’s List, which had an impact on Oskar Schindler.  We spend a day in a newly-opened museum located in Schindler’s former factory.  The museum chronicles the fate of Krakow and its residents during the Nazi invasion.  There are video accounts of WWII survivors, interactive screens, and photos of war heroes and criminals.  For us, the most humbling exhibit is the room of choices in which moving columns have quotes in all different languages of what people did or did not do during this time.  We leave wondering ourselves.

We make the trek to Auschwitz with heavy hearts.  We see the guard towers, the barbed-wire, the barracks, the train tracks with boxcar, the execution sites, the torture areas, and the “Work Sets You Free” sign.  We go to rooms full of glasses, suitcases, shoes, and hair.  There is a room devoted to children and we see their little shoes and their little clothes, their broken dolls and their toys.  We spend almost an hour in a building full of family photos and plaques telling their stories and how all or most of the members lost their lives in concentration camps.  We observe black markers at ponds and fields where ashes were dumped.  We see the gas chambers and crematoriums that lay in ruins because the Nazis tried to cover up their crimes as soon as they got word that the liberators were advancing.  Eventually, we find ourselves here in this quiet meadow under the shade of birch trees staring at a moment captured in time and wishing we could tell those trees to save those people.  Alas, trees can’t talk, they can’t listen, and they can’t save those people.  That responsibility fell on us and all we can do is hope that we never forget that again.