The Bones of Ludvipol
I n 1988, my son Ben and his wife Cindy journeyed to Ludvi - pol to search for our family roots. The Ukrainian terrain is still rough and my feet were not up to the trip, so I did not accompany them. But I put Ben in touch with Samuel Tiktin, the son of Alter and Chava Tiktin (Chava, my great aunt, was my paternal grand- mother’s sister), who was still living in Rovno. Samuel was by then a prominent man, an English-speaking college professor. By 1988, Rovno was part of the USSR and Mikhail Gorbachev was in power. Access was starting to open up and the tight con- trol of the Communist era was beginning to loosen, although travel from town to town was still restricted. Samuel’s connections en- abled Ben and Cindy to make the necessary arrangements for their trip to the Ukraine. As a wounded Soviet war veteran who lost his arm in fighting the Nazis, Samuel had a government-provided car. Samuel and one of his Ukrainian friends drove Ben and Cindy to the site of Ludvi- pol. Formerly lovely Ludvipol had been burned down and rebuilt into a rundown little town called Sosnovoye. The group visited the forest near Ludvipol to see where our peo- ple had been killed. It was a frightening experience for Ben and Cindy, the first Westerners to visit the site of the mass grave. The road they were driving on into the woods ended, then they had to proceed on foot for about half a mile. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a man appeared, shouting and aiming his gun at them. Tiktin yelled in Ukrainian — “What are you doing? These people have come back to look for the grave of their relatives.” The man lowered his gun.
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