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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