Diary of a visit to Dad’s birthplace in Kalusz, now in Western Ukraine By Stefan Reif
After successfully negotiating the hurdles at Munich Airport and seeing grand-daughter Naama safely on to the bus to the tarmac, for the flight to Tel Aviv, we thought we would be back in Salzburg within less than two hours. Alas, the whole of Europe was intent on visiting the Alps on a holiday Sunday in August and it took us almost three and a half hours to make the return journey. But then we relaxed and ate lunch and prepared 90% of our packing on Sunday evening. That was very wise. At 0711 they phoned from Austrian Airlines to say that our 1130 flight to Vienna to link with our flight to Lviv was cancelled. To get our connection we had to take the 0825 flight to Vienna! This they told us at 0711! You will not believe it but at 0815 we were sitting on the plane. I was sure that our suitcase would not make it but there it was at 1530 waiting for us at Lviv Airport! So too our Ukrainian guide Svetlana and our driver Vasily. We were taken to the hotel to unpack quickly before a tour of Jewish Lviv, taking in all the areas that once held 100,000 Jews in a prosperous and varied community. Less than 1,000 survived the Soviet and Nazi invasions. Having our own guide and our own driver meant that we could see a lot in a short time. It was a harrowing experience for the three of us to stand by the ghetto where they were herded, the railway station where they were sent to Belzec, and the camp where they were murdered. But we also saw a little of what had been a very cosmopolitan and cultured community in Austro-Hungary and in Poland before the Russians and the Germans killed it off, each in their own systematic way, sometimes with local Ukrainian help. We had a kosher dinner with a local Hasid, Melech Shochet, who funds a Jewish soup kitchen, gave him a donation for his project and then enjoyed the one night that we had booked in a 5-star hotel, before our car journey to Kalusz. We left the hotel in Lviv/Lwow/Lemberg at 0900 and drove south towards all the shtetelech of eastern Galicia, now Western Ukraine. After a few kilometres of good roads, we were on totally neglected highways that are desperately in need of repair. We stopped at a number of famous Jewish centres, some of which still had 30% or 40% of the population before 1939, and one even had 77%. In Strij and Bolechow, there are huge synagogue shells still standing and now state9