(CNN) -- Poland has been firmly in Ukraine's corner in recent years, which is quite a shift given that the two nations were historically rivals. It seems odd to cheer for a nation whose ancestors tried to kill my mother and destroyed my father's house, but I do. That's because like Poles, Ukrainians suffered greatly under Moscow's oppression, so nothing would please me more than to see Ukraine shake the Kremlin's grip to enjoy freedom and prosperity. Last summer, I visited Rivne and Lviv, Ukraine, hometowns of my mother and father. They were Polish towns, Rowne and Lwow, in 1939 before Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland and changed the map. The word Ukraine means "borderland," as this area changed hands many times among Austria, Poland and Russia before an independent Ukraine was established in 1991.
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Alex Storozynski roots for Ukraine despite the suffering of his family there
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In battles over the "borderland," Ukrainians, Jews, Poles and others lived through horrors
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His mom saw massacres, worked as slave labor; Soviets razed father's house
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On a trip to Ukraine, he searches for his ancestral home and finds much has been lost
We later found an article on a Ukrainian website, revealing that in the 1970s the @placeholder used the tombstones in the construction of a school and a Communist committee building.