Hello everyone

I'll be pleased to answer all your questions on Poland. I must say I'm very pleased by Terry's hospitability - he not only invited me to join this Conference Center, but even created a section on Poland!

Hi Peter, good to see you here. Where are you located in Poland?

Hi Mike I'm located in Rzeszow, some 150 km (or 100 miles) east off Cracow. Generally speaking, in the Sout-East part of Poland. The population is ca. 150,000. Main industry: airborne (enginees and gear-boxes for Russian-originated, but now Polish, helicopters) and household appliances. A very good spot to new business opportunities (100 km from the Ukrainian boarder). Not far away from the Polish mountains (skiing!)

What is it like in the Ukraine? Do you visit there much?

Well, the people are rather poor in the Ukraine, but there is a number of companies who heritaged enormous resources after the Soviet and arm-production era. Therefore there are many people in my region of Poand who plan on common business with Ukraine. Any Western participation welcome!

This topic hasn't been used in so long I doubt anyone will respond, but my maternal grandparents came from a place not far from Peter. A town called Liminova (sp?). They migrated to the US in 1909. Funny story about how my grandmother came to the US. Back in Liminova, the postman one day delivered a letter to the wrong house. My grandmother, then 20, was living there, but the letter was supposed to go to somewhere else. Regardless, she opened the letter and found a ticket to America. So she took it and moved away and never looked back. Back in the 1970s, one of my cousins, who made a pile of money in the pizza business, took a tour of Poland and took his mother (my aunt) and asked grandma if she wanted to go. She declined the offer, perhaps because she was afraid the authorities would find out the circumstances under which she left and make her stay.

That's a great story about finding the ticket that way, George!

That is incredible, George. Why was she so desperate to come to America? Or did she just have that thing in her that said, 'YES, GO, BE A DEVIL!'?

Not sure, Riette. I don't think desperate is the right word. Maybe there was just nothing happening in her hometown, and she had a chance to go. Just go. By the way, she left during the peak years of eastern European immigration to the US, and Chicago was the place most Poles drifted to.

And thank God she did. Imagine if she had had to stay through World War II with the Nazis turning Poland into such a hell hole. Even if she weren't Jewish, just to witness everything that went on, would have been unbearable. I'm currently reading a book about the Holocaust, and the whole of Europe must have been a hell on earth to live in.

What disturbs me most about the Nazi occupation was how many people cooperated with them. That's why I really don't want to know what my distant relatives in Poland did back then. Honestly, I don't want to know.

Well, alot of Poles did betray the Jews, but I think they were just under such enormous pressure, and they had so much to lose. Of course there were many who took pleasure in doing so, but for the most part I can sympathize, because, how can one know how one will react when you're facing a choice between betraying innocent people, and living with a bad conscience, or protecting them, thereby running the rist of having your whole family tortured and killed in front of you. The part that I find hard to un erstand, is how such evil could not only be spread so quickly, but PREVAIL for so long. Of course the SS did consist of convicts and misfits, deliberately chosen to be counted on for brutality and perversion. I am reading a book about the holocaust at the moment - at school we learned nothing of that part of history, since all the leaders of apartheid in South Africa and South West Africa studied in Nazi Germany, and did not think it wise to teach children about these horrors, since that was more or less exactly what they had in mind for black people. And so I have a lot of catching up to o. And what a horrible truth, how depressing. But I think it important that people should know every bit of this truth so that such atrocities will never ever repeat themselves again.

Got any of that wanderlust in your blood, George?

Wanderlust? Well, unlike grandma, I haven't gotten any free tickets anywhere (yet). Nor do I live in a depressing little town. In fact, I've liked everywhere I've lived, with the exception of Cape Coral, Fla., where I spent my teen years. That's the only place that compelled me to get out as soon as I could. As far as wanderlust goes, 9 years ago I decided to leave Tallahassee, where I was reasonably happy and content, to pack up and move to Austin. I'm happy where I'm at now (geographically, if not psyci ally and emotionally).

ride your bike up to Mt. Bonell and toss your troubles off into the river! or... beter yet... ride your bike up to Colorado and toss 'em off a much higherhill (like Mt. Evans at 14,000+ feet) then they'll be farther away!

Mt. Bonnell? They ticket people for that now.

I suppose then you could dig a hole and bury them then.

Might pollute the aquifer.

dump them in a bathtub and wash em down the drain?