Recollection from Dave Jackson:
Whilst having a chat with Gramps about his childhood in Drohiczyn, he described to me how they used to make shoes from tree bark. He described how they would remove the bark from this ‘special tree’ cut it into strips, them weave it into a shoe. For laces to hold them onto their feet , they would unpick hessian from an old sack.
When I asked him if he wore socks with these shoes, he said “No, we didn’t have socks, but in the winter we would wrap our feet with strips of hessian from an old sack, and if your feet got wet they would dry very quickly ”
He couldn’t remember the name of the ” special tree “, but some weeks later I was watching a Ray Mears survival programme, during which he visited a village in Belarus….and amazingly an elderly man made a pair of these shoes for Ray, exactly as your Gramps described to me! He also mentioned the name of the ” special tree “, It was called the ‘Lemon Birch’.
A family called Brojek 