TL;DR: In January 2026 I will walk three hundred miles across Poland from west to east, from the small town of Kostrzyn nad Odrą near the German border, to the capital city of Warsaw. I’ll be roughly following the route that my grandfather Everett Meyer took in Winter 1945 after being liberated from a German prisoner of war camp. Why am I doing this? Historical research, of sorts. In truth, I’ll be figuring out “why” along the way…
***
Writing the above TL;DR just now for the first time surprises me, even though I bought the plane ticket months ago and have been thinking about this trip for a decade.
I’ll be carrying an eighty year old lump of sugar with me on this trip. It belonged to my grandfather Everett, who passed away before I was born. It was a memento I found in an old blue suitcase that my dad keeps in the back of a closet, full of yellowed papers and fading photographs.
There were five more sugar cubes in the matchbox. Also present were three Ritz-type crackers wrapped in wax paper, and a crumbled lump of maybe chocolate.
I’m picturing using it in a celebratory coffee on the last day of my upcoming trip. Dropping it in, dissolving, sipping its ancient crystals. It will have been a long journey for this lump of sugar.
Why has this matchbox of rations been preserved for eighty years? Why would they not have been tossed out or consumed long ago?
I can’t help but think of these ancient calories as a symbolic talisman, a comfort to whoever carries them to know that one always has one last bit of emergency calories on hand.
Did this very same matchbox travel the same journey that I am about to myself?
Family lore is that Everett weighed 120 lbs (54 kg) after his release in 1945. I would probably carry a matchbox of rations with me at all times for the rest of my life too.
***
Walking across rural Poland in winter is perhaps an unconventional route for even the most dedicated hiker. It would be as if a European traveler came to America to walk from Iowa to Indiana, rather than say, the Appalachian Trail.
No offense to Iowa or Indiana.
Lately, over and over again I’ve been typing in the start and end points of my route across the Polish countryside on Google Maps, clicking on “walk” mode, and squinting at unfamiliar characters (ą, ę, ł, ś, ó) dotting the shortest-distance route through thick forests and tidy fields. I can already feel shoulder straps digging into my neck, feel a new blister forming between my toes, and am wondering where I’ll fill up my water bottles next. I have Rosetta Stone downloaded to try and learn how to pronounce ą, ę, ł, ś, and ó.
 |
| The route... |
I am traveling in Poland to re-trace some family history circa World War II. There are countless threads I could pull on with this topic, stretching across the globe from Adak Island to Normandy. This January I will be tugging at just one: I will retrace, on foot, my grandfather’s path across rural Poland as an escaped prisoner of war in the early winter of 1945.
Though I’ve never been to Europe, both my grandfathers spent extended periods there during World War II. On my mom’s side, Dr. Richard Pomeroy hailed from Michigan and served as a medic with the 9th Armored Division, 19th Tank Battalion, later finding a career as an orthopedic surgeon back in East Lansing where my mother grew up. On my dad’s side, Everett Meyer served as an infantryman with the 35th Division, 137th Infantry, returning back to the family farm near Ulysses, Kansas, where my dad is from. My parents met in Alaska in the 1980s amidst a crossover of reindeer behavioral biology research and veterinary medicine, where I showed up not long after.
 |
My parents and I in the "Local Veterans" hall at
the Historic Adobe Museum in Ulysses, Kansas |
 |
Everett in uniform. My trip
itinerary in the caption... |
I've never been much of a war historian. I find myself glazing over from the “voice” in most writing about military history: insular, hyper-specific details of troop counts, tank movements, and mass fatalities like a physicist's description of electron orbitals. Rare are the stories about World War II that I can wrap my head around: absurdist or humanist takes like Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five or Begnini’s Life is Beautiful come the closest.
So, I am engaging with history in a way that I more readily connect with than museums and documentaries: going on a backpacking trip. A hike in the same place and same time of the year that my grandfather also would have gone on a long “hike.” That happens to be across farmland in the deep of winter in Poland.
“Hike” is obviously the wrong word. From October 1944 through January 1945, Everett was interned in the German prisoner of war camp Stalag III-C after being captured in a firefight in France. What little is documented of that time and place is brutal. The camp housed thousands of captured soldiers from around the world, countless of whom were executed or starved to death. It was one small island of misery in a sea of destruction. (In a future post, I’ll share some camp “recipes” from prisoner journals).
His time in the camp came to an abrupt end on January 31, 1945, in the waning days of the war. On that morning, distant rumbles from a Soviet tank battalion rolling west towards the front lines alarmed the German guards. The guards decided to abandon ship and evacuate all of the several thousand prisoners, proceeding en masse only several miles down the road before encountering the tanks. The Soviets opened fire, believing they had stumbled across a large regiment of German soldiers rather than a gaggle of ragged, starved prisoners of various nationalities. My dad reports that in the confusion, Everett found himself in a foxhole next to a German soldier who just hours ago had been his prison guard, both now holding on for life.
In the ensuing chaos, Allied soldiers who managed to escape and survive were left to find their own way back to safety. Bands of escaped POWs roamed the Polish countryside for some weeks and months, my grandfather among them. How they found food, shelter, and warmth in those winter months, and how they found their way home is a tale not well documented. It must have included significant misery and confusion, as well as generosity by the residents of war-torn rural Poland, who shared hospitality at their peril while still under the crumbling German occupation.
About six weeks later Everett had found his way to the bombed-out city of Warsaw by some combination of walking and hitchhiking, ribs showing. A train ride to the port city of Odessa in what is today Ukraine brought him to a series of ships to England then back to the US. (Perhaps he is one of thousands of voices stuffing their faces with Salisbury steak to regain weight in this echoey cafeteria recording from June 4, 1945: The World War II Radio Podcast: Interviews with Returned POWs).
I never met Everett as he passed away of cardiac arrest in 1980 well before I was born. Perhaps he’d puzzle at my plans to trek through the Polish countryside eighty years later. Maybe it was just another miserable slice of history that would be better left buried in dust. Why dwell on long forgotten adversities? Surely there’s a thousand other ways to learn about and understand history.
And yet, long journeys far from home must run in the family, I can’t stop doing them. Usually my treks are in the wilderness, climbing mountains or floating rivers. I have a portfolio of long walks under my belt. I find joy in wearing out shoes. Walking across a landscape is how I connect with it.
In the future I hope to pursue other threads of family history on foot, but this January trip will take singular focus just to get from point A to point B at about 25 km (15 miles) per day. This will be a trip for walking and not a whole lot else. It will be one of relative luxury and ease though, compared to 1945. I intend to be as self-sufficient and low-budget as possible, using a map of free camping areas published by a Polish Forestry agency downloaded to my phone. I’ve been slowly acquiring lighter-weight backpacking gear. I’ve made several local contacts along the way through Couchsurfing.org, a website akin to AirBnB but without a paywall that I’ve used for nearly twenty years as both host and guest. I’ll probably even have a few hotel nights. I look forward to encountering locals bemused by my travel plans, just as I often meet misty-eyed travelers here at home in Alaska seeking that convenient roadside stop just outside the airport where brown bears catch salmon as the aurora sways overhead and Denali looms on the horizon.
I have a trove of old letters and a few photos that may serve as interesting markers along the trail that I’ll be sharing later, as well as details about Stalag IIIC (the recipes!). Stay tuned for those posts.
Perhaps a keen reader is still wondering, correctly, why does Ben need to do this trip? I don’t, of course. It is a question I am still working to distill, and maybe I’ll need all three hundred miles to ponder it. Maybe I can tell you by the end.
***
One additional detail: I literally would not exist had my grandfather not survived his time in Europe.
A small black and white photo of Everett with an infant and a young woman on a doorstep sits atop an armoire at my parents house. They are my dad’s brother David Meyer (1943-2013) and his mother Arlene (1921-2007). There’s something wrong with the photo though: it is punctured with a long streak, nearly shredding mother and son in half. The photo traveled with Everett folded up in a leather pocket billfold throughout his time overseas, and was punctured when it was hit with metal shrapnel in an explosion somewhere in France. The wallet shielded the shrapnel from penetrating further, perhaps from far worse. My dad didn’t show up until about a year after Everett was back home in Kansas.
 |
| Shrapenel-damaged Meyer family photograph, circa 1943 |
The photograph is a memory as a physical object. I am as hardheaded a scientist as you can imagine, but I also believe that memories live animistically in the physical matter that created them; not solely a synapse in our brain or a book on a shelf. A memory could also be something like my lump of sugar. I hope that this trip can be something like that old picture: a physical token to remind me I’m lucky to be here. Perhaps somewhere along the way I’ll stumble across something that will explain why another Meyer has returned to wander the countryside nearly a century later.
In researching this post I stumbled across the website of the local museum in Kostryzyn highlighting remnants of an 1866 granite statue newly discovered in a nearby forest from the Prussian-Austrian war, a reminder that the land I’ll be traversing has traded kingdoms more times than I’ll ever be able to count. Today another war burns in Ukraine not far south from where I’ll be traveling.
I expect to find things that I do not expect. Almost certainly more artifacts are waiting to be unburied, somewhere along the way.
Sources
Muzeum Twierdzy Kostrzyn.
“Na Starym Mieście Powstanie Lapidarium.” Muzeum Twierdzy Kostrzyn, accessed November 20, 2025.
http://muzeum.kostrzyn.pl/pl/z-zycia-twierdzy/aktualnosci/item/1448-na-starym-miescie-powstanie-lapidarium
The National WWII Museum.
“The Perils of Liberation: Caught in the Crossfire Outside Stalag III-C.” The National WWII Museum, accessed November 20, 2025.
https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/perils-liberation-crossfire-outside-stalag-iii-c
State Forests (Lasy Państwowe).
“Forest Data Bank (BDL) Map Portal.” Forest Data Bank, accessed December 20, 2025. https://www.bdl.lasy.gov.pl/portal/mapy-en?t=0&ll=19.412949%2C52.001221&scale=4622324&map=8%2C0.7&layers=76%2C77&basemap=2&extwms=&hist=
The World War 2 Radio Podcast.
“UN Conference Update / Interviews with POWs.” The World War 2 Radio Podcast, accessed November 20, 2025.
https://poddtoppen.se/podcast/1527137716/the-world-war-2-radio-podcast/un-conference-updateinterviews-with-pows
Trimble, Lee, with Jeremy Dronfield.
Beyond the Call: The True Story of One World War II Pilot’s Covert Mission to Rescue POWs on the Eastern Front. New York: Berkeley Caliber, 2015.
