Sugar-factory strikers block highway
"Got your camera? Let's go!" said Andrzej Klajn as he propped a "Press Official" sign in his RV window, grabbed two cameras and waded into a crowd of banner-waving sugar-factory workers.
The authorities in Warsaw planned to close the plant, Szczebrzeszyn's last remaining major industry, at the end of the year because it wasn't in line with the regulations of the European Union, which Poland had joined a few days earlier on May 1. About 200 workers and supporters proceeded streamed out of the plant and onto the main road between Zamosc and Szczebrzeszyn. They walked in a big circle around the crossroads, and traffic backed up for about 10 vehicles in each direction.
After about 15 minutes, police officers blew whistles and the marchers withdrew to let the traffic through, then the protesters resumed blocking the intersection. Several carried "Solidarnosc" banners for the Solidarity union, which had defied the Soviet-controlled government in the 1980s and accelerated the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.

Andrzej, who was born in Szczebrzeszyn in 1945, had met me as I stepped off the bus from Zamosc and basically adopted me into his extended family. With his girlfriend, Teresa, we drove in his RV all around this valley of villages along the Wieprz River in southeastern Poland. That day in Szczebrzeszyn, we witnessed just the latest instance of Poles resisting distant powers encroaching on their freedom.

Bones unearthed at Nazi massacre site
About 65 years earlier on this ground, Nazi Germany not only fought to take away Poles' freedom, it tried to eliminate all of them in what some historians call the Polish Holocaust, or "forgotten Holocaust."
Most people are aware that the Nazis murdered about 6 million Jews and 3 million others, including non-Jewish Poles and Gypsies.
Another way of looking at the Holocaust is that the Nazi genocide machine killed 6 million Polish citizens, about half Jewish and half non-Jewish.
Zamosc, where I spent two nights about 12 miles east of here, was the epicenter of the Polish Holocaust. The stately Renaissance town, founded in 1580 and modeled on Padua, Italy, was once a center of multicultural enlightenment. Catholic, Russian Orthodox, Jewish and Muslim scholars taught at the Zamosc Academy. The Jewish shtetl (village) culture immortalized by Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer was just one of the civilizations that flourished around Poland in the 16th through 19th centuries.
Multicultural life came to a halt with the Nazi occupation. The Nazis renamed Zamosc "Himmlerstadt," started to rid the region of its Jewish and Christian Polish residents, and planned to repopulate the fertile land with Germans who would form a bulwark against the Soviets to the east.
The Nazis occupying Szczebrzeszyn sent trainloads of Poles to their deaths in slave-labor camps in Germany and concentration camps in Poland, including nearby Belzec. Polish children with Aryan features were sent to Germany to be raised as Germans. One such train from Szczebrzeszyn did not make it to Germany; dozens of dead blond children were found locked inside after the war. Other citizens were killed in their homes, on the street or in a cemetery.
I drove with Andrzej, Teresa and Tomasz Gaudnik, a Szczebrzeszyn writer with a Web site dedicated to the area, to the Christian cemetery northwest of town. The graves, well-tended and covered with flowers, overlooked the Wieprz valley, lush with green pastures and apple and cherry blossoms.
We viewed the graves of Mikolaj and Juanna Talanda, the grandparents of my father-in-law, Dr. Edmund Talanda of Kalamazoo, who left Szczebrzeszyn as a baby in 1925. We visited the tombs of Stanislawa Kaczorowska, the maternal grandmother of Pope John Paul II; and of Szczebrzeszyn's most famous citizen, author Zygmunt Klukowski. His "Diary from the Years of Occupation 1939-44" recounts the atrocities of the Nazis and the heroism of the resistance fighters, including several Talandas.
We saw numerous graves of partisans, not far from the forests where they hid out during the occupation. Perhaps because almost all of its citizens were targeted for destruction, Poland was the only occupied nation that did not collaborate with the Nazis.
Andrzej told me the Nazis had asked his father to join their ranks because of his German surname. Instead, his father took to the woods around Szczebrzeszyn and fought with the partisans. Later, the Communists asked Andrzej, then a 22-year-old student at the Zamosc university, to train as a spy. He refused and escaped to Sweden, where he married and built a new life as an engineer and businessman.
Tomasz and I walked down the road from the Christian cemetery and waded through the underbrush of the Jewish cemetery, where the Nazis had forced dozens of Szczebrzeszyn Jews to dig their own mass grave and shot them. Started in 1590, the cemetery is overgrown with trees and littered with garbage, and most of the tombstones have been knocked over or are standing at odd angles.
Dr. Leonard Talanda, an elderly medic who had treated residents of all faiths, describes the October 1942 massacre in a letter archived at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority in Israel. German soldiers ordered the town's last remaining Jews to take off their clothes and stand by the trench. Non-Jewish residents, forced to watch, were promised the homes and possessions of their slain neighbors.
The Nazis started firing before the Jews finished praying, and men, women and children fell into the pit. One woman shouted to the Germans, "You will not kill my baby," and she threw the infant into the trench and jumped in herself. The bullets caught them both in mid-air. The non-Jewish residents obeyed orders to fill in the trench with dirt and take the clothing. Then they began a mad rush to take over the homes of the murdered Jews, and the Germans killed dozens of them.

Human bones startle visitors
At the massacre site, Tomasz and I saw three juveniles smoking and drinking beer by a dead campfire. I said, "Aren't they supposed to be in school?" Tomasz said this to the kids in Polish and told them I was a visiting American. The kids laughed and one said, "No war in Iraq!"
Then we stumbled on the biggest shock: human bones at the edge of the cemetery. They were lying in a shallow hole near a muddy black garbage bag.
I saw at least three femurs, a sacroiliac and a bunch of other bones and fragments. We fetched Andrzej and Teresa, who cried a little and crossed herself when she saw the remains.
We went to the police station and led two officers to the scene.
They took a statement from Andrzej and said they'd investigate.
Every day in Poland, I was struck by the contrast between the grisly past and the promising present. A few days earlier, I had taken a bus from Krakow to Oswiecim, known as Auschwitz in German. The bus went through rolling hills along the Vistula River, heart of Poland. Castles and a dome-towered monastery stood impressively on the bluffs. Fruit trees bloomed white, canola bloomed yellow, farmers tilled their fields with horse-drawn plows, elegantly dressed young women laughed merrily and walked briskly down the village sidewalks.
Inside the Auschwitz death camp lay piles of hair the Nazis harvested from women about to enter the gas chambers. Other displays held the shoes and eyeglasses victims left behind - and a German-tailored jacket with a lining made of human hair.
The prisoners' barracks in Auschwitz have been turned into memorials honoring the various ethnic groups the Nazis targeted for genocide. The building featuring Roma and Sinti, the proper names for the people known as Gypsies, displays a list of the 21,000 who died in Auschwitz. I was surprised to find 44 Meinhardts and a Meinhart, original spellings of my family name.
The Polish building includes documents detailing the Nazi plan to destroy Polish culture and the Polish people through overwork and "undernourishment." Photographs show executions by gunfire and hanging; in one scene, grinning German soldiers hack up the corpse of a Polish partisan. Here, too, are documents detailing the Polish resistance and the Zegota movement, by which Catholic Poles saved 75,000 of their Jewish neighbors from death.
The Nazis often destroyed entire villages to punish those who helped Jews and partisans. Near Szczebrzeszyn, we visited Sochy, bombed and burned to the ground on June 1, 1943. A church, scores of white crosses and an arch reading "Thou Shalt Not Kill" stand near the collective grave of 185 villagers.

Friends unite to boost town
Teresa's sister and sister-in-law joined us during this drive around the Wieprz valley, which provided more contrast and relief from the terrors of the past. We visited numerous churches, including one on an island in a lake in Zwierzyniec and a couple built entirely of wood near an outdoor concert site by the Wieprz. The women stopped for short prayers at some of the churches. At roadside shrines to Mary around the valley, in an area known for its deep forests and wild horses, young people gathered in the evening for devotions to Mary called Majowka, for the month of May.
Days earlier in Czestochowa, about two hours by train from Krakow, I caught a glimpse of the loving faith that has sustained Catholic Poles through centuries of horror and glory.
Love and faith in the Holy Family flowed strongly in Poland through the early 1600s, when it was one of the largest and richest nations in Europe, through 1795 to 1914, when Poland ceased to exist as a state, through the years of German and Soviet domination, up to the present time of revitalization.
Thousands of Poles gathered at the Jasna Gora monastery, home of the icon of the Black Madonna, on May 3 for the Feast of the Queen of Poland.
After a huge, open-air Mass in light rain, I was honored to kneel among these gentle, wise people for another Mass in the chapel housing the medieval picture of dark-skinned Mary and baby Jesus, which was painted on a table from the home of the Holy Family. The sense of loving energy flowing around and through us like liquid light was powerful enough to melt icebergs of hate, fear and greed.
Once again, I tapped again into the love and solidarity of Polish people around Szczebrzeszyn.
Andrzej drove us around the town to gather signatures to start up the Friends of Szczebrzeszyn, dedicated to promoting the town as a tourist destination and to aiding its children from dysfunctional and alcoholic families. Founding members included a noted artist, the high-school principal, several town council members and Jerzy Jurczykowski, an amazing 75-year-old who draws from memory maps of the town at various points in its history.
Remembering the beer-quaffing juveniles in the cemetery, I made a donation on behalf of the Talanda extended family. At a little ceremony in the office of Mayor Marian Mazur, I said, "I am honored to be in the town that gave birth to the ancestors of my children and to my many new Polish friends."
"It is we who are honored," said the mayor, who joined us later at a forest park for a picnic with Andrzej's extended family.
Hospitality abounds as strangers become friends.
Travel tip: Make friends in Poland, and you'll never go hungry.
At dinners and breakfasts at the home of Andrzej's mother, sister and brother-in-law, I was encouraged to eat helping after helping of breaded pork cutlet, sauerkraut, potato soup, an endless variety of sausages, and bread with a crackling crust and a chewy, yeasty crumb.
In Teresa's Warsaw apartment, she served a breakfast of marinated fish and more fine bread with homemade blackberry jam before I went to a free concert at Chopin's birthplace with her sister-in-law and nephew.
The picnic featured at least 10 kilometers of kielbasa (Torunska variety) broiled on a charcoal grill, three kinds of mustard and horseradish, and wheat and rye bread with sweet butter, all washed down with Bulgarian wine and beer brewed in nearby Zwierzyniec. I kept eating long after I was full.
It was impossible not to join in the conviviality.
The mayor arrived stiff as Leonid Brezhnev in his black suit, but he soon loosened up and swapped jokes with Andrzej and his brother-in-law.
I thanked Mazur for his commitment to democratic principles - Andrzej had told me he had struggled with remnants of the old Communist power structure in his efforts to be responsive to ordinary citizens.
We all practiced English and Polish, enabling me to move beyond my standard "Przepraszam, nie mowie po Polsku" (sorry, I don't speak Polish). Basking in the music and laughter and pine-scented spring air, I realized that the Poles, reborn as free people, had discovered the only sane response to the dark past: the light of faith, love, music and joy.
The mayor parted by kissing the hands of all the women present. Inspired by the gallant example of the mayor and many other Polish gentlemen, and emboldened by the Zwiec beer, I began adopting this custom. The ladies at the picnic didn't seem to mind.