Up the Pruth River to... (Iași - 3168 km)

(Iași, 07.10.2013 - 10.10.2013) At the age of eleven or twelve, my late father Julius Hauster (1912-2001) made an attept to run away from home. Starting Bräuhausgasse in Czernowitz, past the Jewish Cemetery and the Horecza Forest, he reached the Pruth River, as he stated in his memoirs. He intended to trek down the Pruth to Galați and Constanţa in order to sign up for a maritime sailing vessel. The plan failed, a farmer picked him up after a few miles and brought him back to Czernowitz next day. I'm taking the same route, but the other way round, nine decades later and by motorcycle. No farmer, no policeman, no border guard obstructed my plan so far and therefore please follow me up the Pruth River to Iași:

Very close to the point, where Romanian troops, following the order of Marshal Ion Antonescu, crossed the Pruth River on June 22, 1941 and started the Operation Brbarossa, i. e. the Invasion of the Soviet Union, I make a side trip to Arsura, a small Moldavian village.

The photo above shows the birth house of Dr. Nicolae Lupu (1876-1947), a Romanian politician and medical doctor, active in the National Peasants' Party. He provably effected several rescue operations in favor of the Romanian Jews from Bukovina and Bessarabia, as documented by Yad Vashem by the report Solidarity and Rescue in Romania.