After spending two nights in Wroclaw, Poland, we headed out by slow train through the Polish countryside to Jelenia Gora, where a friendly gentleman who knew some German and had been with us on the train directed us to the bus that would take us to Karpacz, where we are now staying.
We decided to stay in Karpacz as it is a touristy ski town with lots of accommodation options only 6km from Kowary, which used to be called Schmiedeberg, where my great great grandparents lived for at least 20 years of their lives until they died.
Karpacz (still referred to sometimes by its old German name, Krummhübel) is a quaint little town, visited by mostly Polish and German tourists for skiing in winter and hiking in summer. The surroundings are most beautiful and it was a relief to be out in the countryside after spending all of our trip in big cities so far.
Yesterday morning we took a taxi up the mountain to
Wang church, a Lutheran church which had originally stood in Vang Norway (since 1200) before it was re-erected in Krummhübel in 1842, meaning it would have been here already when Johann Friederich and Josefine came here, and it is likely that they would have visited the church as they were Lutherans.
Behind this unusual and striking building we found a well-kept cemetary with German graves from before the Second World War, which surprised us, as we were under the impression that all the German graves on the Polish side of the Riesengebirge were destroyed after the war and after the German inhabitants had been driven out. Finding these graves gave us a bit of hope that we might also find the graves of Johann Friederich and Josefine somewhere in Buschvorwerk or Schmiedeberg.
So today we got up early to hike the 6km to Schmiedeberg (Kowary), passing through Buschvorwerk (Krzaczyna), where we know Johann Friederich's funeral took place, according to the funeral letter in our possession. As we were walking along, taking in the beauty and calmness of the environment, my mother remarked how much this place looked like Wilderness, George, where my grandfather (Heinz Herbert Meissner I) had bought a farm many years ago. In fact, all of my grandfather's children and grandchildren would feel very comfortable and at home in these surroundings!
When we arrived in the tiny town of Krzaczyna, we tried to imagine which of the houses would have already been there at the turn of the previous century, make-believing that one of the houses could have been that of my great great grandparents. We also kept an eye out for gravestones anywhere, but didn't see anything. While scouring a map on an information board in Krzaczyna, two Polish hikers stopped by to find out if they could help us. When they realised we couldn't speak Polish, they called a man who was standing nearby who knew some German. He told us that there were no cemetaries in Krzaczyna, but that there were two in Kowary, an older one and a newer one, which he pointed out to us on the map.
So off we went to Kowary, finding the old town a little run down but still looking exactly the same as a
hundred years and more ago, except that all of the street names had been changed from German to Polish and the shops were more modern, of course. About a hundred metres behind the town hall we found the cemetary, and we began to scour the graves for any German names or dates from before the war. We soon realised, however, that all of the names were in Polish and the earliest deaths were from the fifties.
Feeling a bit defeated, we started making our way back in the direction we came from. Along what we thought was just a very overgrown, open plot, ran a stone wall that seemed as if it had been standing there for at least a century. I ran my eyes along the length of the wall, and suddenly something clicked. I saw that there was a narrow footpath going through the long grass and weeds and started following it in the direction of what looked like a wooden cross and a steel cross on a wooden pedestal, but the footpath turned away from it and we couldn't get to it. I tried another way through the grass where it wasn't as overgrown, and came upon what looked like a piece of a broken gravestone, and further on another.
Meantime my mom, who was wearing longer pants than I, had made her way through the long grass to where the crosses were standing, and told me they were definitely marking the spot where two graves were. That was it - I had to see them for myself! I started wading through the grass, just hoping that there weren't any snakes or poison ivy or deep holes that I couldn't see, and finally made it there. Although completely covered with moss and grass, I could definitely make out the two graves, although any inscriptions that might have been there, would have been impossible to read, even if I did remove all of the moss covering first. The two crosses seem to have been erected there, perhaps a decade or two decades ago, and were much newer than the graves themselves. A remembrance of sorts. Looking around I could make out other pieces of broken stone beneath the grass - vaguely. We were standing in the middle of what would have been quite a big cemetary in its day, surrounded by an old stone wall.
Could this be where all of the Germans who inhabited and died in the town, then called Schmiedeberg, had been buried? Had the gravestones that should have been standing there been destroyed by the Russians, or the Poles, after the remaining Germans were forcefully removed in 1946? Were Johann Friederich or Josefine perhaps buried somewhere in that very cemetary - six feet beneath where I had been traipsing through the grass? I kept on mulling over these questions in the bus on the way back to Karpacz. Perhaps we will find the answer in the Jelenia Gora (Hirschberg) archives, where we are headed tomorrow morning.
PS. I will try to add some photos of the hidden cemetary as soon as I am able to use my own computer again.
PPS. A Google search this afternoon led me to
these two photos of Buschvorwerk in the olden days, added by an anonymous person. Underneath the first the "publisher" is named as Paul Fischer, whose name I immediately recognised as the same as the person who took the only photograph of Johann Friederich and Josefine we have in our posession!
