The Parish Chronicle of Chomiakówka, a village in the Tarnopol region in today's Western Ukraine, covers the period 1939-1955. Its author, Kazimierz Fleischhacker, the local Roman Catholic priest, made it an accurate and stunningly revealing record of events with worldwide significance, developments in Poland and the Soviet Union, as well as things that mattered principally to the residents of the Tarnopol region or just the village o f Chomiakówka itself. Although he was cut off from Poland by the postwar Polish- -Soviet border, Father Fleischhacker continued to follow with keen interest the events in Poland, the pace of political change and the impact o f communist rule on the Church. His notes and reflections are proof of the strength o f his emotional ties with Poland.The importance of Father Fleischhacker's testimony is hard to overestimate. His chronicle is a grassroots record of political and social upheavals, of religious life and the situation of the church, and of the consciousness of people living in the territories taken over by USSR in the aftermath of the Second World War. He describes the successive occupation regimes, German, Soviet, again German, and then the triumphant, and seemingly final, return of the Soviet reality. His accounts of Ukrainian massacres of the Polish civilian population in the Tarnopol region, written from the point of view o f a direct witness, will remain an invaluable historical source. The author is clearly surprised and dismayed by the utter savagery with which Polish families are killed by their former neighbours in the name of an independent Ukraine.No less valuable are Father Fleischhacker's notes on the introduction of the communist socio-political order in the Tarnopol region. The new Soviet order was imposed by means of terror, yet there were individuals and even whole groups that were more than happy to see it come. They looked forward to a future free from all the traditional moral norms. It is impossible not to be touched by the overtones of pain and helplessness which increasingly accompany the old priest's attempts to teach the people the principles of the Christian faith. In spite of a harrowing sense of futility of his mission Father Fleischhacker did not give in to despair; he carried on patiently in a community devastated by atheist indoctrination until his death. His heroic loyalty to the Church and the Tamopol homeland was not futile: thanks to his perseverance the Chomiakówka parish as well as the neighbouring Roman Catholic communities have survived and can now enjoy a great revival of religious and moral life.