Shivering in a freezing April rain, I said Kaddish at a mass grave in northwestern Ukraine. On Oct. 1, 1942, the Nazis marched thousands of Jews from the town of Lyuboml to the forest, made them strip and lie in a ditch, and shot them. The victims included children and probably some of my relatives. They rest under a faded plaque.
I wrote in The Current in November about my trip to heavily bombed Kharkiv in northeastern Ukraine, which I took in part because my grandfather, Sam Reisman, was born there. But I was wrong, so I began my fifth volunteering trip to Ukraine during the full-scale Russian invasion in a town not far from the Polish border. In a 2010 book, the historian Timothy Snyder called that region the Bloodlands.
Before the trip, when I showed my wife Michelle my itinerary, she laughed. Over two weeks, I planned to lead 17 drama therapy workshops with 300 teenagers, psychology students, veterans, health care workers and artists in the Carpathian Mountains and, as I had on past trips, in Lviv, Kyiv and Kharkiv. But first I needed to explore my newly discovered Ukrainian roots.
Sam, who died before I was born, emigrated to the U.S. in 1921 from Lyuboml, which was part of Russia when he was growing up and Poland when he left. Most of his uncles, aunts and cousins perished during the Holocaust.
My pilgrimage kicked off with a seven-hour border crossing aboard a grungy bus that dropped me at a gas station on the Warsaw-Kyiv highway — not exactly the luxurious Jewish heritage tour depicted in the 2024 film A Real Pain, but the toilet was clean.
There I met my guide and translator, Alex Dunai, who drove me into town. Before the pandemic and the invasion, Jews looking for their ancestral Ukrainian shtetls kept Alex busy most of the year. But he said I was only his fifth customer since 2020. Now he raises money for military and civilian assistance and, with his daughter, runs a bagel cafe in Lviv.
The directors at the Lyuboml History Museum warmly welcomed me with sandwiches, sweets and coffee. Its three rooms are stuffed with fossils, photos and nationalistic fervor. A modest display about the history of local Jews is tucked into a hallway. Someday it will be bigger, they said.
Mr. Ostapiuk, a septuagenarian, proudly displayed his collection of dozens of original, multicolored labels from vodka bottles produced by the distillery owned by my great-uncle Moshe Rajzman in the 1920s, one of the biggest in Poland at the time. Sam must have left just before business took off, which for my sake is probably a good thing.
After gifting me a few labels, Ostapiuk led me around town, pointing out the site of the majestic synagogue built in the 17th century (destroyed by the Soviets in 1947), remnants of two Jewish cemeteries (one destroyed by the Soviets in 1939, the other recently fenced but overrun by weeds) and the still-intact distillery.
To reach the mass grave, we had to drive down a long dirt road that probably doesn’t look much different than it did on that day.
Afterward, we returned to the museum for a much-needed drink. I gave Ostapiuk a copy of my grandparents’ wedding photo, taken in New York City in 1928, with Sam posing like a swell and my nana Anna like a flapper. You can’t tell that they were poor Jews only a few years off the boat who had lived through violence and deprivation as children on the Eastern Front during World War I.
I visited with Mykola Dzei, who for more than 30 years has interviewed locals and published articles about the fate of Lyuboml Jews during the Nazi occupation. Full of nervous energy, he is not afraid to dive into the extremely touchy subject of what Ukrainians did during the war. Some helped Jews; most didn’t. Some collaborated with the Nazis, sometimes under fear of death, sometimes not.
History is not documents or objects in a glass case but about connecting to people and learning who we are and how we should live.
The next day I rode the train to the Carpathians, where I led drama therapy sessions in an art retreat for children from frontline towns. The retreat had been organized by a nongovernmental organization (NGO) called Art Therapy Force. We improvised scenes and expressed intense emotions through physical sculptures and a vocal orchestra but did not enact their experiences during the war. They preferred to ride the magic carpet to New York City, which made me think of my grandparents.
After 10 days in Lviv and Kyiv leading 10 workshops, the Russians “welcomed” me back to my new favorite city, Kharkiv, with an overnight missile and drone attack while I hunkered in a basement hotel room.
In the morning, the clerk (Oksana) and clinic director (Alex) greeted me with bloodshot eyes. In between workshops, I visited the zoo and a beautiful park.
After my last session, I made a beeline to the Sumsky Market, a light-filled, upscale shopping mall across the street from the military hospital. It had been damaged by Russian strikes since my last visit, but the raw bar was still intact. Sitting among defiant Kharkivites, I ate oysters. I barely made the night train to begin the long journey home.
