Many of you followed my wanderings through Galicia and Bukovina and I’m grateful to you and your comments. With me was my old camera; I took photos whenever I was travelling in the last two years. Classic black and white photography. Thanks to the Rhineland Regional Association I’m now able to publish some of my photos as a book.

Titel “Spurensuche”

Coming on January 15: my book “Spurensuche” (Searching for Traces). 64 pages with 52 full-page photos of the remaining Jewish heritage of Galicia and Bukovina in Western Ukraine. You can pre-order through your bookstore (ISBN 978-3-00-048258-8) or directly from the publisher (http://www.reserv-art.de/webseiten/Publikationen.html) by sending an e-mail to fotografie@reserv-art.de.

Galicia and Bukovina are old cultural landscapes in East Central Europe. After several changes in borderlines, the disappearance and formation of states, Eastern Galicia and Northern Bukovina are now part of Ukraine.
Towns and villages were and are multi-ethnic communities. Ukrainians, Poles, Romanians, Jews, Armenians, German, Hungarians, Czechs, Romani and other nations have lived and continue to live there – albeit in a different proportional composition as before 2nd World War. Jews have shaped the region as nowhere else in Europe.
During the German occupation, the Jewish population was almost completely wiped out. Western Ukraine is still a landscape after a genocide. Overgrown Jewish cemeteries, ruins of synagogues, study houses, schools, cultural institutions, and mass graves bear witness to Jewish life and its destruction. What survived the destruction of the Germans and their allies, has been misused by the Soviets or was finally erased. This book and its images documents, what is still visible from the Jewish past of the region today.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.