Return to Androszówka (Part 1)

(For Marta Wajda-Spohn, who made it all happen, my thanks).

There is a mysterious and powerful communion between the soul and the soil that fashioned it.

If you listen to the hidden voices that sing within you; if you follow the channels of blood (and not the mind) to where they lead you through the twisted channels of your life, you arrive inexorably at the dust and soil of your ancestors.

In the summer of 2010 I travelled to the tiny village of Andrushivka in Volhynia (western Ukraine), to the place where my grandmother settled after fleeing Soviet Russia in 1920, to the place where my mother was born.

Volhynia is a landscape too vast and varied for any singing of it. The sky dominates everything here.  It has the most fertile soil in all Europe, so dark and rich that almost anything can grow in it. But the earth is saturated with blood, including the blood of my own family. No place in Europe suffered more through massacres, ethnic cleansing and genocide than Volhynia, the "killing fields" of WW2.

If you are ever fortunate enough to return to the soil of your ancestors, you break out in a sweat. You feel the tactile presence of the grandmothers and great grandmothers who struggled to bring you into existence. It is as if the earthen womb recognizes the worth of her children and demands an account. What have you done with your life? What did you do with the body I loaned you, the emotions I breathed into you, the talents I bestowed upon you? Did you squander them? Or use them wisely?

Until the summer of 2010, I had known Androszówka only from stories told to me in childhood. It was a place out of a fairy tale. So when I finally saw the Cyrillic signpost at the entrance to the village, my mind became intoxicated, dream-enlarged. It began to blossom out, to burst the confines of logic. I found myself weeping over the enormity of what had been lost, and the beauty I was unable to express. I spread out my arms like a great flying swan. I wanted to remember everything just as it was at that precise moment: the quality of the light, the shapes of the trees, the sound of the birds, the singing of the villagers in the Orthodox church, every twist and turn of the road.

This is an account of my visit; whom I met, what stories I was told, and what I brought home with me in my heart and my head.


© Ryszard Antolak