The Folks Next Door

How far is it from Brooklyn to Bukowsko? They seemed remarkably close last week as an old woman stood in Bukowsko's ashes and said, "Everything's boined." She, like a lot of other people in Polish Galicia, had lived for years in the U.S., had come home before the war not because Galicia was better or richer, but because she was born there.

Galicia seemed much more remote a year ago, when U.S. policymakers agreed "tentatively" to U.S.S.R. proposals for boundary shifts in eastern Europe. The Russo-Polish border moved west. In return the Poles got not only a large slice of German land but a Russian promise to take into Russia thousands of Ukrainians who had lived for generations among the Poles.

The maps published a year ago showed where the San River ran, past towns with unpronounceable names, out of the Carpathian foothills; the stories told in plausible, abstract terms how populations would be shifted from this side to that side of new lines on a map. Neither maps nor stories showed the whitewashed cottages of Galicia nor told how the people who lived there felt about it.

The Ukrainians did not want to leave. Thousands of them took to the hills under the leadership of a man whom all Galicia calls "The Colonel"; he is said to be a former German SS officer. As Poles, evicted from land in the north taken over by Russia, came into Galicia, the Ukrainian bands raided villages, tossing flaming brands on straw-thatched roofs. The Ukrainians aped the nations by demanding impossible reparations; from little Bukowsko they demanded one million zlotys. When the 3,000 villagers raised only 300,000 zlotys, the raiders burned all but eleven of Bukowsko's 400 cottages, John Kinglarski, who used to mine coal near Kingston, Pa., said the Ukrainians had burned his plow and stolen two horses and a cow for which he had paid 8,000 zlotys ($80). Kinglarski, who was wrapped in burlap bags, waved an old U.S. passport. "I had beautiful clothes in America," he said.

Andrew Kotalik, who once worked as a boilermaker for the Lackawanna Railroad, summed up his recent life in words that contracted the world's dimensions more strikingly than air-travel statistics and which made peace terms seem more real than all the speeches of statesmen: "From de war we ain't had enough. From de Joimans we ain't had enough. Den dem bandit fellers come and dey boint down de houses' and boint my horse and four sheepses. Excuse my English, but can't you folks do something for us folks?"

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