Wednesday, April 5, 2000
Rather than try to explain the weird story that Linda passed along, I'll just quote Linda's e-mail about what her friend Marzanna told her: "The address of the Polish one [letter found at Grandma's house]-written in 1976-was from a town called Targoszyn which I found near a place called Legnica. I heard that town mentioned before by gramma but it's nowhere near the Ukrainian border. It's in the southern 'corner' near Germany. Marzanna said that it's near a place called Lwow or something [may actually be Lwówek Ilski or possibly Lwówek, or maybe even both] and that there is a local joke there that when someone says they are from Lwow that they don't mean they are from there but from another town in the Ukraine. I told her that people in Poland have a very strange sense of humor. Back before the war, the people living in the Ukraine knew they were going to be too close to the area of conflict in the border area and if they didn't move that they would be under Russian military rule. So, many of the inhabitants that were afraid to stay there, relocated en masse to the region of Poland near Legnica. Thus the weird joke."
Posted at 10:18:32 PM
