Eufrozyna and Jan Lewkowski

In the beginning of 1940, Grandma and Grandpa received Soviet passports, a fact paradoxically noted on a certified copy of their church marriage license. They gained Soviet citizenship, with all its consequences. The inhabitants of Lviv of similar status (an employee of the courthouse, a home owner) typically received a “paragraph 11” stamp in their Soviet identification documents, which meant that one would be forbidden from living in large cities and was required to resettle within a distance of no less than a hundred kilometers away from the border of “German-Soviet friendship.” Thus, in comparison with others, my grandparents got quite lucky. Nevertheless, Providence was mediated by circumstance—the house was tiny, its location not particularly attractive for newcomers, and Grandpa worked as a simple clerk, not as a judge. (8)

Grandpa Jan Lewkowski and Grandma Eufrozyna, née Fedyk, bought the house on Mączna (Muchna) Street a few months before Mom was born. A young couple they were not. Grandpa was a widower (his first wife, Franciszka, née Utzig, died childless) and was approaching sixty. In 1938 he married for the second time, a woman from Pochayiv who was thirty-three years his junior. The ceremony took place in an Orthodox church in Lviv. Their house was located in a quiet area, near a neighborhood where university faculty lived and a park called Kaiserwald (Shevchenko Park, after the war). The neighborhood was mostly inhabited by Poles, yet there was no shortage of Ukrainians either, though there were relatively few Jews in the district of Łyczaków (Lychakiv). (9-11)