My Visit to Lublin, Poland My visit in October to the city of Lublin in eastern Poland began with a drive southeast from Warsaw through a great swath of farmland that stretches as far as the eye can see and is as flat as Kansas or the San Joaquin Valley in California. There are many long stretches of the road which go through a double line of trees, many of them dying from the mistletoe that clings to their branches. There are roadside stands selling food and drivers just pull off the road; this is not a freeway and there are no exit ramps.
Prostitutes wearing provocative clothing line both sides of the road to accommodate truck drivers traveling in either direction. Standing right alongside them are peasant women making a few extra zlotys by selling the wild mushrooms they have picked in the forest.
The major farm crop in this area seems to be potatoes, although the land is broken up into many small fields without fences, rather than large fields planted in a single crop. Lublin is in southeastern Poland where the land was formerly divided into great feudal estates, owned by a few aristocratic families, while the majority of the people were serfs or peasants. Farming in this area is still done manually by peasants or with horse drawn farm implements, although you also see a few tractors out in the fields or traveling on the highway with the cars.
Southeastern Poland is still sparsely populated and there is a lot of forest land remaining. It is easy to see why the Germans coveted this great wealth of land for their "Lebensraum," and thought of this area as comparable to the American West. One gets the impression that this is land that is not being used for maximum food production.
This part of Poland is a great plain which continues on into the Ukraine to the east. With so many forests for partisans to hide in, and no natural barriers to stop an invading army, one can readily see why Poland was one vast battleground in two World wars.
