Visit to Poland and Luft IV

In March 2007 I had a chance to visit Gdansk, Poland for business. I quickly found that I would be only about 250 kilometers (155 miles) away from the site where my father had been a POW during WWII. With the help of a Polish colleague I was able to put a plan in place to get me to the nearest big town, Bialogard (pronounced bee-aah-woh-gard), on the train line.

Once I arrived in Bialogard I had to work around the language barrier to get a taxi to the memorial site. Luckily I had found a Polish website with info on Luft IV so I brought a printout of it. That and a lot of hand waving finally got me a taxi driver to take me. First we stopped at a local cemetery so I was beginning to wonder if I had a failure to communicate. We soon left there and ended up where I wanted to be.

I had the driver take a picture of me at the site in Modrolas and then had him leave. I spent the next few hours walking through the woods with a compass, old camp drawings and a low resolution Google Earth image of the area. I took pictures of all the ruins I could find in the area.