Turning Hearts

*Warning: this is kind of long and may only be interesting to family members!*

Last Friday was one of the most memorable days of our little journey. Thursday night we'd reached Żary, Poland (formerly the German town of Sorau in Prussia) and found one of probably only 2 or 3 hotels in town. After spending an afternoon on small country roads with potholes and poor patch jobs stretching mile after mile through beautiful farmland and dark woods--complete with illness recovery and lack of confidence in map-reading skills--it was a relief to actually find the town, even if the hotel was straight out of the '60s, smoke and all. With darkness setting in by 5:00 pm and Thursday being an Eastern European holiday, nothing was open and we did not really want to go outside anyway, so we set in for a long night's sleep so we'd be ready to go the next day.

We'd come to Żary for a particular reason--to try to "discover" or feel a connection with some of our roots and, if possible, to fill in any genealogical gaps. My great grandmother (my dad's grandmother)--Hedwig Emma Barg--was born in this Prussian town in 1895, where her family met LDS missionaries and joined the LDS Church, moving to SLC in 1900.

All we really had to go off of was one photograph of Grandma Hedwig as a young girl, holding a watering can, standing on a street in front of a shop. (Most of our family has probably seen this picture--I wanted to scan it in, but I don't have a copy--if I get one, I'll post it) The back of the picture was labeled something like: "Hedwig as a child. Sorau, Prussia Freibusser Strasse. The family lived above this store." I'll admit that I wasn't too hopeful.

At the beginning of the day, things didn't seem to promising. It drizzled the entire day, and we could not find one person in the entire town that spoke English. The street name we had was the old German name--the area we were in had been given to Poland after WWII; everything German was stripped down and replaced with Polish, and it seems that most German people must have left. Dad and I finally found a map of Żary in a bookstore after searching for awhile, but it was all in Polish.

We wandered (rather aimlessly) for quite a while before coming across a large-ish town square with some city municipal offices. I waited outside; Mom and Dad didn't reemerge for about 30 minutes; they'd had some luck. They found a history office (or something?) where there were 2 girls that kind of spoke English. They gave us a list of all the street names with their corresponding old German names. Freibusserstrasse was nowhere to be found. However, we had another lead to check--the two girls had given us the address of the city history museum and the name of a person to talk to there.

We found the city museum, only to discover that it was locked. Fearing it was closed for the holiday weekend, we rang the bell next to the door anyway. A man promptly came to the door, and when Dad showed him the name of the person he was looking for, the man made it clear (not so much by speaking English!) that he was our guy. Progress! He looked at our picture and the street name and nothing rang a bell. He left to a back room for about 15 minutes and came back with a map telling us--with a mixture of German, Polish, and English--where the street was. We thanked him and stepped outside, grouping to look at the map more carefully before setting off. While we were still huddled out front, the man (I wish I could give him a name, but I don't remember it) ran outside and basically said (in my English translation of his hodgepodge of languages): "Stop! Wait! Let me see the map again; I told you the wrong thing." He'd had a moment of inspiration after we left and realized that the street we were looking for was not "Freibusserstrasse," but "Priebuserstrasse." (He had originally directed us to Busserstrasse) As he pointed us in that direction, he warned us that the building we were looking for might not be there any longer; we set out again, all the time on foot.

Finding Priebuserstrasse, now Ul. Stefana Okrzei, was fairly easy, as it was a pretty main thoroughfare heading out from the train station. We walked up the 2/3 mile road looking carefully at each building, repeatedly holding up our old picture to compare shapes and proportions. Nothing looked like it. We found one sort of similar building, but knew that it wasn't the same. After we reached the end of the street, we turned around and headed back. When we got back to the building that we had thought looked similar, we were going to just take a picture of it and call it good. However, as we approached, I started looking closely at the building 2 down from our target; I couldn't imagine that we would have missed it the first time, but it did look similar. I told Dad to pull out the picture again and we sat across the street excitedly comparing window size, cornice shapes, and brick numbers. We'd found it! It really was pretty exciting--maybe not like finding the Ark of the Covenant or the Holy Grail, but we did kind of feel like Indiana Jones. We had found the very house where Grandma Hedwig lived--and was probably born--and it was still standing there. A door had been turned into a window and the trees in front were gone, but there it was--1/2 a world away from the place where I remember meeting her when I was a young girl. I really did, strangely, feel closer to her and her family. I also really feel like she and Grandpa Mark helped us find it.

Our last stop was to go by the cemetery and see what we could find. Because of the holiday in Poland, literally every single grave was covered with lots and lots of flowers. It was beautiful. Sadly, however, we were told that an elementary school was built on top of the old town cemetery--all the graves in the "new" cemetery were too recent to be of interest to our family. We saw another little cemetery on the map that looked nearer to the house we had found, so we stopped there on the way out of town. There, too, any old gravestones had long since been removed or faded away.

While we may not have found everything we wanted, the trip was well worth its time and distance. I really do have a renewed interest in family history and feel that walking those streets helped to "turn my heart" back again to my ancestors and to eternal things.

Here are a few pictures of the Żary experience:

This was the only road sign picture I got (obviously out the car window), but I kind of like the blurriness of it--it seems to portray well how surreal the experience was:


Our really cool 1960s peach colored hotel room:


An old Żary street. Dad kept making us put our umbrellas down because he didn't want them in the pictures--I had assumed (wrongly, obviously!) that he was cutting the umbrellas out of the pictures!


Mom and Dad at the little town history museum where we got the final breakthrough clue:


The find! We tried to take a picture from the same angle as the old picture we had--I really need to get a copy of the old one and put them side by side. The peach-y building on the right is the building that Grandma lived in. That window and archway used to be a door (which threw us off the first time around) to a store. Grandma's family lived on the floors above.


Another view of the upstairs living quarters:


View down the street--back in the old days there were trees where this sidewalk is:


Priebuserstrasse today:


I just threw this in...this was a typical site on the trip--us trying to figure out what in the world we were doing: