Ludvipol: A Modern Shtetl
A Happy Childhood
brothers sometime between 1922 and 1925. It had been a difficult time in this part of Poland, and my grandfather had set out to find a better life for his family. But my father and his sister, my aunt Chava, remained. Chava was married to a successful businessman and my father also had a thriving business; there was no motivation for them to seek a better life at the time. I know even less about my mother’s family. My mother’s par- ents were dead. I know that my mother had brothers and sisters, that her maiden name was Yanoshifker, and that her father’s name was Arieh. I believe I was named after him. Before the war, we were comfortable and we had a good, happy life. We lived in a small, old Jewish town in Poland named Ludvipol. Today, this town is in the Ukraine and is called Sosnovoye. Ludvipol was surrounded by Ukrainian and Polish villages, but most of the people were Ukrainians because this section of Poland was almost a Ukrainian province near the Russian border. In our town, there were approximately two thousand inhabitants, including some 150 non-Jews, mostly Polish and some Ukrainian. The Ukrainians had been trying for generations to gain their in- dependence. After the First World War, new borders had been es- tablished and the Ukraine was split, with half given to Russia and the other half, where we lived, annexed to Poland. The Ukrainians were frustrated to be part of Poland and were hostile to the Polish government. Meanwhile, Poland was anxious to control the area and bring Polish settlers, osadnikie , there. To strengthen its foothold, the gov- ernment encouraged Poles from as far away as Warsaw to resettle in our area, Volhynia, and gave them subsidies and excellent farm- ing land. Poland needed its own settlements to gain control over the province. As a result, 10 to 15 percent of the farmers were Poles, and there were entirely Polish villages in strategic locations near crossroads or rivers. It was before my time, but I do not believe that any Ukrainians ever moved farther east into the Ukraine, where good land was available. In those days people did not repatriate easily. When I was born, only eighteen or twenty of the villages
29
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online