6 | MARCH 31 • 2022 

essay
Europe’s ‘Bloodlands’ 
W

illiam Brawer, 
my maternal 
great-grandfather, 
was born in a village just 
outside the Galician town of 
Rohatyn. An 
acquaintance 
has devoted 
herself to pre-
serving the 
history of that 
shtetl — erect-
ing a memorial, 
creating a vast 
digital archive, 
retrieving matzevot (sacred 
pillars) unearthed during 
construction projects. She 
and her husband, both from 
California, even relocated to 
the nearby city of Lviv, and my 
wife has regularly lobbied for 
a visit to Rohatyn. “We’ll be so 
close,” she said a few months 
ago about my upcoming work 

in Poland. “You really need to 
go back to Ukraine.”
Like millions of American 
Jews with Ashkenazi roots, 
I can link my family to the 
troubled lands that now fill 
our newsfeeds each morning, 
though the complex borders 
of Eastern and Central Europe 
can frustrate those seeking 
ancestral connections. 
For many years, I accept-
ed what the Ellis Island and 
census records said: that my 
great-grandfather was from 
Austria, and even imagined 
him waltzing in Vienna. 
In fact, over his 84 years, 
Pomonieta changed hands 
five times: surrendered from 
the Austrian empire to Poland 
after the First World War, 
overrun by the Soviets as part 
of its 1939 non-aggression 
pact with Nazi Germany, con-

quered by Hitler’s forces in 
1941, and then “liberated” by 
Stalin’s army in 1944 — a bru-
tal shotgun marriage endured 
for five decades. 
With the collapse of the 
Soviet Union, that small 
village an hour from Lviv 
at last became part of an 
independent Ukraine. At the 
time of this writing in mid-
March, Pomonieta, about 100 
miles from the Polish border, 

remains under Ukrainian 
control, though missiles have 
rained down near Lviv.
Each day I read news of 
the conflict. And each day I 
remember my visit to Kyiv 
in 2016. That trip across 
Eastern Europe, sponsored 
by the Holocaust Education 
Foundation, attracted me for 
two reasons: we would work 
in neglected Jewish cemeter-
ies, and we would visit the 

Rob 
Franciosi
Grand 
Valley State 
University

The Babyn Yar Memorial in Ukraine

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