Ch 4-3 We Find Heydekrug

Focal point in the city is the tall spire of the Lutheran, or German Evangelisch, church. It is a simple, white structure with a thin spire built in 1926.  In this church my parents were married on April 3, 1944, not in her old parish church in Werden. When she took up residence in Heydekrug she defected to the 'big' city church. Werden is now part of this city and that church rotted to nothing after use for storage by Russians.

There is no doubt these Lutheran churches are a roduct of northern temperaments – no gaudy ornamentation here. Religion is dour and spared of excess decorations reflective of the landscape and climate. On the architectural side, this Heydekrug church doesn’t have the square towers typical of most East Prussian churches probably due to its more recent construction.

I missed the opportunity to go in and view the church do regret it. I've never experienced a German church service. Would anything have seemed familiar to what I grew up hearing?  We never attended German language services in Detroit which were held into the 1960's. My parents were pragmatic so we attended a neighborhood church, Lutheran Missouri Synod. They did not gravitate to the old German communities on the east side of Detroit. When they could break their bondage period they wanted to settle someplace new away from relatives and Germans.  It is a hard decision for all immigrants whther to stay together or explore the new.

That other Lutheran church, much older, was in an adjacent village - Werden. It was

destroyed in the war, we're told. But later I read an account that Russians used it for flax storage after the war; it then burned and was rebuilt.  At any rate, it's gone, now an empty lot next to a small stream.  Werden used to be the Redetzki family parish church where Mom was confirmed. For years it served as the Parish church for the communities of Gnieballen, Grabuppen, Kirlikken.  These are the communities where my ancestors lived.  The loss of the church means the loss of church records, a problem for researching genealogy.

The hierarchy for placing churches was strictly regulated by the bureaucracy of the Evangelische Kirche, somewhat in the same way the Catholic Church designates parishes.  Several villages made up a Kirchspiel. In turn several of these made up the Kirchkreise that was the equivalent governmental unit. When searching church records you have to establish which village belongs to a respective Kirchspiel. Not so easy as they changed frequently over 200 years as populations grew. Sometimes the new parishes don’t make geographic sense.  While easy to find the dates for when a Kirchspiel was established, the list doesn’t tell you which group they belonged to prior to any change. This means I can find church records for Groß Warningken, home for the Meihoefers, Kirchspiel founded in 1893, but I need records prior to that date.  Means I have to search handwritten records of adjacent parishes until I find the records pertaining to Groß Warningken. There goes my eyesight.

Ch 4-2 Finding Heydekrug

1846 map Heidekrug

We finally reach the city she once called home. Roughly translated from the old German, Heydekrug can mean either heather land or inn.  Or it could be a derivation of a word for pagan – Heiden.  I’m going for the pagan idea. Lithuanians call it Silute. 

The city sits on the edge of the Memel River where the land changes from marshy to sandy.  On first impression it appears a pretty typical, central European city. The buildings and streets don’t offer any clues to its founding in 1511. I notice it lacks a traditional central marketplace. Later I discover the old marketplace on the edge of the old city, no longer in use. 

Buildings lining the main street are post office, grocery stores, local history museum, and a church. Don’t see any clothing stores, bakeries or houseware shops, standard in most German cities. It is all very well kept, as is much of what we have seen so far. 

Under German administration since 1815 Heydekrug was the seat of the county, called Kreis. Population now stands at 22,000 compared to 1925 when it was just over 4,000, but there was more population in the many surrounding small villages. None of the structures are older than one hundred years so young by European standards. So much was destroyed by a succession of wars and invaders – Teutonic Knights, Napoleon, various Kaisers, Czar Nicholas, Hitler, Stalin – all directing troops across this land as if it were a military playground.  This area's misfortune is to be positioned at a particularly volatile location between Germany and Russia. Lots of troops and settlers, back and forth, over the centuries.

The city is quite built up, stores on the side streets off the main thoroughfare. A very tall apartment building is visible to the south. Sunshine, blue sky and the world looks bright as shoppers bustle about. I honestly expected a bit of postwar Europe with some ruins, bricks and stucco falling off the buildings like old communist East Germany, but that’s not what I find. And Mom expected a 1945 war torn landscape.  In the ten years since the fall of the Communist empire, things changed quickly, probably more than in the previous forty years.  

On my first visit to the newly open eastern Germany, one year after the wall came down, the fresh, bright look to what had been run down was the most noticeable change. Previously the only color was a uniform, drab color I call Socialist grey.  It made life feel grey and dingy.  Another difference were bright accents in the landscaping: advertising! Didn't have that before. It wasn’t that inhabitants didn’t want their homes and businesses to look good – they just couldn’t purchase supplies to fix things up.  It took my East German Uncle years to construct a new entry foyer to their house. They had to wait for supplies to trickle in to stores then line up soon as word got out. While driving round the countryside they kept eyes open to check for supplies laying around that they could steal. Stolen goods were also useful to barter for other needed items. That was life in the workers’ paradise, the German Democratic Republic. If you showed the slightest discontent with the situation you were labeled a capitalist or maybe even a fascist – not sure which was worse.

We drive around by car, another sign of the times. Like America tourists with a lot of distance to cover, we’re used to viewing scenery from a car window, as if watching television.  Heydekrug is just a bit too big and spread out for us to walk the distances comfortably, most of it being new residential sprawl. The city was laid out along the main road which makes for a long city. We’ll get out of the car eventually, but the changes of the past 50 years seem minor in that it's very familiar to my mother. She finds her way around familiar landmarks like she is heading out on a lunch break from the grain cooperative where she worked. Mom does seem excited to see it all again, a good sign. I was apprehensive about what we’d find and how her reaction.

We drive into Heydekrug following the stream of traffic down the main street. Lots of shoppers crowd the sidewalks. People are dressed up and look very fit – probably because they do all this walking. Wonder how much this street scene changed in the last 10 years.

Is that a liveliness in their step as they walk down the street? They are not schlepping about humorless as in days where people avoided eye contact as in East Germany.  It is a lightness of being, if only reflecting hope for the future and the illusion of now having some control over one’s life.

Ch 4-1 On the Road from Memel

At long last we make our way to that city, heard about so often in reminiscences that it took on near mythical status like Camelot.  As I grew up it was referred to usually fondly with accounts of fun on the farm, references to the upper class family where she worked as a Nanny then later her work as a bookkeeper. Her frame of reference was always an explanation by comparison with her life; relating it to her. I didn't see that pre-war Germany of 40 years ago related in any way to working in corporate America. Same way parents used Depression era examples to instruct their baby boomer children. This is where my mother experienced the exhilaration of life on her own, the excitement of leaving the farm having her own friends and rented room. So often the stories began: “Damals, in Heydekrug…”  It reminded me of “once upon a time…"

I couldn’t find this city on maps available to me in the U.S., just as hard to find on maps of present day Germany which made it seem even more imaginary.  Did anyone else come from this city? I was looking for some sort of confirmation of the stories. The problem lay in that it no longer existed as part of Germany after World War II. It was way off to the north, up in the far fringes near Finland.  1950’s maps ignored the area as it was a Soviet satellite country. These Baltic countries didn’t even warrant names on maps, just showed up in the same color as the USSR.

That it no longer existed as an entity made it more mythical.  A make believe place, one whose existence is entirely dependent on memories of former inhabitants. There are no books about it. The subject of the war and what ensued afterward was considered taboo in Germany. No one goes there and no one comes out. It fell off the earth.  Does a tree falling in the forest make a sound if no one is there?  Does a place exist if people can’t find it on a map?

None of their circle of East Prussian German friends came from there but then all of them came from forgotten places in that province.  At our German deli in Detroit we bought an aromatic cheese that was founded in a city up there – Tilsiter, but that was it. As a result I grew up with a rather confusing German identity: I was German, but not from actual Germany.

To be German in post-War America meant sauerkraut, beer steins, snowy Bavarian villages, Frankenmuth chicken dinners and the Colonel Klink stereotypes.  We rarely ate sauerkraut, chicken dinners were not a mainstay in any German restaurant other than Wienerwald, and steins were Bavarian like those Christmas scenes. This was the accepted image and the way our Germaness was defined in our adopted country, the United States.  They called my sister a Nazi in elementary school, and the slur dogged me throughout my life. The Germany of American troops, the section of the country they occupy still is Bavaria and central Germany.  You talked of Prussians, well, who doesn’t think of spiked helmets and the old Prussian Empire in Berlin. Weren’t the Prussians the ones who fought in the American Revolution? No, those were Hessians.

We didn’t have a real place that people in the U.S. heard of, so it was easier to think in terms of stereotypes and generalities. Americans generally have a pretty understanding of foreign cultures in general, unless they had soldiers there which is then a stilted view. It was simpler to just say “we’re German” and let it go, unless asked for details which I gave only when I sensed someone might actually have a deeper understanding of that eastern area. Too often it ended in a long discussion that showed them to be ignorant of geography and the Allied reapportioning of Germany.   

Worse yet, not only did my parents come from a place that nobody heard of, but I was born in a communist country!  In the 1950’s Cold War era, checking under the bed for Commies, this was generally met with amazement.  Then they asked “well how did you cross the wall”?  Yes, I knew people who thought the Berlin Wall ran the length of the country, even in 1982.  I think they confused it with the Great Wall of China. 

Once we're past Memel city limits the landscape takes on an idyllic, pastoral look.  Cows and horses stand out in the open fields, peacefully grazing without fences to keep them in the field.  We drive along and see a solitary cow here and there and an occasional horse, all standing alone out in the field, grazing, with no fence, no electric wire. 

“Boy they have their livestock well trained” I exclaim.  In America we have to fence them in or they run off!  Here they just stand in one spot and graze. “That’s amazing!  How do they do that?”

Later we saw a person out in the field with a stool and bucket milking a cow.  Amazing! These animals were content to graze unattended in an unfenced field! My mother was also impressed. She’d never seen anything like it.

A day or two later, on one of our drives I notice a chain hanging from the cow’s neck.  They are tethered!  They bolt them to the spot with a chain! Do we feel stupid... they used an anchor of sorts. They were not trained like an obedient dog, they moved them around the field to better graze the field. Certainly did keep the field nicely trimmed.  As people didn’t seem to have more than one or two cows this method worked quite well. You could maybe even consider it ‘greener’ grazing. I’m so glad we didn’t ask anyone about the well trained livestock.

Ch 3-2 Ankunft - Klaipeda

We lay in our beds awake for a short time talking about impressions so far.  Mom realizes that this is not the Lithuania of her memories.  So far so good, and we still go on about the great service on Air Lithuania especially after the atrocious meal on Northwestern.  Are we so food driven?

Morning comes! Breakfast!  We're famished!  Dressed and down to the main restaurant we go. The large dining room is set up with a buffet and the room is already full of – eh gads – Germans!  There is a big tour group of them, so big it might be two groups actually. An invasion? Okay, we’re now Americans for all practical purposes.  Any nationality in a large group is to be avoided. In a herd they often exemplify the worst qualities of their nationality. There is something a bit off about sitting in Lithuania and hearing only German.

We’re hungry so take a quick look over the whole buffet before getting in line.  What a lovely assortment! If this is a sign of how things will be we’re happy. You may travel for the sights, but food will make or break the trip.  My parents maintained a German kitchen, never developed American taste buds. I never lack for good food in Europe unlike when I travel through America. Exception being one trip to Czechoslovakia right after the fall where I purchased a sausage from an outdoor vendor.  Yuck, truly inedible; made me recall Upton Sinclair’s infamous book about the meat packing industry. Tossed it after one bite. For all the years and all the travels that really isn’t much. Oh yeah, the Czech bottled beer was odd with a layer of sediment in the bottom; refrained from calling out ‘bottoms up’.

Oh gosh we are now stuffed, but in a promising mood to uncover more of this country. While waiting for my mother to come down and join me for breakfast, I went ahead and made arrangements for her to have a massage. I expect she’d enjoy that after her long flight. So when she heads off for her massage I head outside for a preview walk to see what I missed yesterday evening.

Early morning rush hour, people hustle along the streets. The hotel fronts on a river or perhaps a canal, I can’t determine which, north of the city center. There's a vibrant feel to the city, alive with activity. This is a port city but I can’t see any signs of a harbor even as I follow the river. The weather is lovely. After about an hour I head back to the hotel.

She loved her massage, her first ever. A genuine Russian trained masseur beat her up pretty good so by her standards means it was excellent. It has to hurt to be any good. She’s already excited about having another appointment when we return.

We go to meet our rental car agent at the hotel. Algeridas, first name basis, is prompt and also speaks English! This is a surprise. There hasn’t been much time for the country to get English in the schools since the border opened. The language requirement used to be Russian, English a possibility sometime later in their schooling. This young entrepreneur is 20-ish. I found his agency on the internet and the prices were so much better than those of the American companies. So what if I’m driving a used Opal instead of a new Volkswagen. Anyway it's better not to be too conspicuous as a foreigner. Forget that Mercedes!

Algeridas asks where we will be staying in Silute (our Heydekrug) and whether there will be safe facilities for the car. I’m puzzled by this question. I tell him the bed and breakfast we reserved which is all I know. He informs me that there is a problem keeping cars from being stolen, so he wants to make sure the car will be secured evenings. We wind up the paperwork and he takes me to where he has parked the car. To return the car at the end of our stay I need only to park the car on the street near the hotel and then tell him the car’s location. Easy as that. There is no hotel parking lot. Once we’re done with the car stuff we check out of the hotel and hit the road!

I have all my maps at hand and it proves easy to find a way out of the city heading south. The industrial scenery of the city outskirts is all new construction. Amazing how fast change has taken place. Several American businesses have facilities here, among them R.J. Reynolds and Kraft. They lost no time in establishing a presence. Generally it all looks very clean and neat, a bit reminiscent of traveling in Germany 30 years ago. People were very friendly back then too, back when the U.S. dollar was still a desirable currency and they pretended to like Americans. Although every time we toured any historic castle or estate the German guides made a point of stating that Americans bombed the place heavily in the war.

Memel Aerial View

We travel through little cities and villages whose names bring back memories for Mom. It looks more like current day rural Germany than old Memelland. And we get closer to Heydekrug.

Ch 3-1 Ankunft - Arrival

Arrival at Palanga is in the pitch dark of night. Good I don't have to start this part with a ‘dark and stormy night’ opening.  With a small plane there are few passengers so customs is a quick event. But we have to wait in the very unlit terminal for officials to show up. Is our scheduled flight unexpected? 

Finally they come in: customs, passport control and various uniformed personnel who just stand around. The last time I experienced this was on arrival at a Bahamian island; thought it a Caribbean thing. In the U.S. the officials are ready and waiting to scrutinize your papers and your soul. 

The terminal is dark; perhaps the lights don't work. There's very little signage in the large hall and no colorful commercial advertising. Passport and customs procedures alone tell me the days of Communist ways of doing things are long gone as it's pretty easy to get through.  Nothing spoken, no questions, no official scrutinizing your passport waiting for you to break a sweat, like in the good ole days when I tensely stood in front of East Germans officials.   

Now we just have to figure out how to get out of the airport and make the journey to our hotel in Memel (Klaipeda).  I forgot to plan for this little detail.

The airplane crew assembles on the sidewalk. A van pulls up and they get in. I ask if we can join them for the ride to Memel.  "Of course." During the ride we talk with our stewardess who speaks some English and wants to work on her English. I have so many questions.  Outside it's dark and I can’t see any of the countryside. I don’t see any hotels. It's disorienting to arrive in a new place in the dark – but heightens my anticipation for the next day. I peer out the windows trying to catch some glimpse, a clue, wanting to get a sense of place. In the dim glow of the streetlamps I see store fronts, houses, shrubbery.  Looks normal.

The van stops in front of a store and some of the crew go in. Maybe they need to buy food before going home. Amazing that anything is even open after 10 pm; German grocery stores don’t stay open late. Peering out the van’s side window I strain to look in the store. I see shelves full of merchandise; what kind of store is this?  I try to get a feel for this country where I’ll be spending the next week to verify if this trip was a good decision or will be a disaster. Absolutely no traffic on the two-lane road.

The people in the van, crew and driver, know each other well.  Even without speaking the language it's easy to sense a camaraderie among them. Imparts a good feeling so see people freely chatting with one another.

Crew members get dropped off along the way. We arrive at the Hotel Klaipeda in downtown Memel, a big modern structure, at least 15 stories.  Maybe was the hotel of choice for the party faithful back in good old days as the comrades couldn't afford travel. Check in is efficient and again English is spoken!  I get info on exchanging money as Litas are not available outside the country.

The lobby looks like any other big hotel.  Off to one side is a restaurant, a gift shop nearby and of course a postcard rack.  I head over to take a quick assessment of significant sights in town. Looks like any middle European city, the usual old buildings and an occasional monument in the center of a marketplace.

It hits us just how tired we are, exhausted and ready for bed. A porter takes us to our room, how nice, all of us with two suitcases pressed into the tiny elevator.  I read signs for massage, sauna and advertisement pictures of lovely people enjoying a big classy restaurant.  This is a really big hotel, but we are here for one night only.  We’ll have another chance to explore before leaving the country when we stay here before catching an early morning flight to Hamburg on September 11^th. 

The room is tiny!  Décor is a sort of Scandinavian style - call it northern European modern.  Barely room for the two beds, a chair, us and that really big suitcase. I once stayed in a London hotel where it was really hard getting myself and my suitcase into the room at the same time; had to make use of the bed to do it.  We do have a private bath which is always a nice perk.  So as long as we coordinate our movements, and don’t change course abruptly, we’re fine in the tight space.  No need to unpack as we won’t be here long. 

Ch 2-3 On Our Way - Air Lithuania

Was I ever in for a surprise. After some initial confusion at the gate as there were two flights leaving for Lithuania at the same time – one for the capital city Vilnius and the other for Palanga, things were fine. Once on board it turned into a truly pleasant flight.

After a short time in the air we are served a cold plate for dinner.  Lovely sandwiches made of hearty rye bread, smoked salmon and garnish.  And to sweeten the palate, a tasty candy made by Kraft Foods in Lithuania – somehow reassuring to know that capitalists already made inroads. For our beverage we get a beer.  It is simple.  It is delightful.  It tastes wonderful. The staff is attentive in a sort of throwback to what air travel was like years ago. The plane itself is an older American model evidenced by the English language warning signs and markings.

I had no idea what awaited us in Lithuania.   At least at this point in my life when traveling I have cash and charge cards so what problems can't be solved by money? This is a far cry from my student days where cash was tight and traveling cheap meant a lot of waiting for trains and hostels entry. No longer do we have to worry about being hauled off by the Stasi, or KGB, or whatever just because we are Americans, or do we?  Are remnants of the old guard lurking in doorways waiting to nab us innocents and hold us for ransom a warning as the U.S. Consulate in Germany warned me about the DDR. 

Anyway, just how bad could a place be that's on the internet?  Remember this is the early days of the net. It’s the first time I’ve used the internet for travel arrangements.  I did have to write the bed and breakfast for confirm our reservations, but I saw photos of the house online.  Amazing how quickly countries that didn't have personal telephone service became wired.

Mom worries about visiting the country she remembers from fifty-five years ago. It exists only in memories, a place where she never stayed in a hotel, owned a car or ate in restaurants.  Transport was by horse cart, foot, bike or train. She knows the stories about Germans who traveled back in recent years when it was still a Soviet satellite. They tell of poverty, desolation and the difficulty to secure any sort of transport.  Mentally she is prepared for scenes similar to what she experienced on her trips to East Germany years ago – a colorless socialist monolith; streets full of sullen, expressionless people; everyone cautious about what they said and who they spoke with.

Why didn’t we go to Lithuania years earlier when it was still communist?  We simply couldn’t.  On this side you’d end up with a knock on the door from the FBI, as happened to me after my first visit to East Germany.  Driving in East Germany on a visit I asked cousin Horst about the lack of road signs along the highway. He claimed it was intentional; the government figured locals knew where they had to go but they didn’t want to make things easy in case the country was invaded. Everyone knows invading East Germany was a high priority for the Americans, right? More likely it was due to a shortage of materials. Nor did our family have contacts in Lithuania. There were no family members left alive in East Prussia.

It would have been ever so much easier for us to take one of the tour groups originating out of Germany. There is a lot of interest in Germany among former inhabitants, like my mother, to go back and revisit their homeland.  But these tours only go to the major cities and our interest is out in the hinterlands. And I simply couldn’t stand being stuck with a group of elderly Germans for any length of time.  It might have been interesting to hear their tales of life back then, but the structure of a tour group would prove constrictive. So we will see it our way, at our pace, with Mom as tour guide.

 

 

Ch 2-2 On Our Way - Via Hamburg

Mother is Edith Waltraut Klemm, nee Redetzki.  She last saw this 'home' 57 years ago as she fled the country with her sister, mother and a newborn baby, in front of rapidly advancing enemy Russian troops so close they heard artillery fire.  Home is in the cities of Heydekrug and Groß Grabuppen in Memelland, East Prussia.

None of us even considered the possibility of ever visiting Memelland. I should have paid closer attention when family and friends told their stories, but it was so remote and not like a place I could ever visit.  How quickly everything changed, the last fifty years erased, an entire ideology made obsolete overnight.  No more tense border crossings, guard dogs, searches for decadent capitalist printed matter, costly visa applications, absurd registration formalities. No more hypocrisy about using barbed wire and mines are to keep out capitalists. In retrospect it all sounds so ridiculous now, doesn't it? Is that how things really were, the young wonder.

In spite of a dismal start at Metro, I'm excited with a real sense of adventure about this trip.  The air of anticipation reminds me of trips in my younger days, the thrill of discovery and new experiences. That rush from uncertainty of what awaits. Uncertainty also makes me nervous at what awaits my mother.

First stop - Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, a big cosmopolitan airport.  People look so stylish as they walk briskly along brightly lit corridors. I feel schlumpy. Even the airport staff looks so efficient in their snappy outfits. After Metro 6 hours ago the contrast is stark. Now we deal with an unwritten law of Airport Travel – your connecting flight will be the furthest gate from where you landed.  I guide mother through the maze of corridors peering above heads for clues on to finding our gate. Mom is able bodied but I do need to take her elbow and steer.

Finally we find our gate, get on a shuttle bus, go to another corridor, and then arrive at the new gate to wait. I make the decisions, checking signs, asking directions, carry the hand luggage and gently move Mom. She is a bit like a piece of extra baggage!  I will say she’s very agreeable, doesn’t argue or contradict, but leaves it all in my hands which makes it easier. I don’t have to explain or clarify or argue, easier than our road trip. Fortunately I’m making the right choices and don’t have to backtrack.

Even though this is our first stop in European territory, a quick passport check suffices, luggage booked through. No security checks. Us Americans are, however, relegated to the long line of non-EU people.  Oh how I long for the good old days when a U.S. passport entitled you to speedy transit past all the poor huddled masses clinging to hopes of entry.  This Euroland thing doesn’t favor Americans.  Maybe I should look into getting back my German citizenship so I can take the fast lane.  When my parents took U.S. citizenship I slid through as a minor, and we were required to renounce previous country allegiances. No dual citizenship in those days; I feel cheated. 

Next stop – Hamburg, Germany for the plane to Lithuania. Hamburg is a city I love to visit, good associations with this city. I selected this transit point instead of Berlin as on the return flight we'll take an extra night to stay with relatives. It's a long layover so Mom and I amble around the airport. Suddenly I hear someone calling across the concourse "Tante Edith!" Walking towards us across the broad expanse are two familiar people - my cousin Irmgard and husband Alfred. So totally unexpected!  Irmgard was my father’s favorite niece, and I became close during my years in Germany.  (Many years later I learned she was the first choice for my godmother, but that's another story.) What a delight!  They decided to surprise us on our stopover even though they knew we were stopping on our return trip. They're both retired but the airport is quite a drive from their home. Warm hugs and welcomes all around.

First gotta work getting our German up to speed.  Up the stairs we go to a cafeteria on the mezzanine with a great view across the main concourse.  The food service is very posh with a heavenly assortment of food and drink - beer, wine, champagne. Of course, we’re clearly in Europe now! 

Here the staff is dressed in crisp white shirts, black vests, pants and bow ties.  They are foreign, i.e. non-German, but classier than hometown folks at Metro.  What a great variety of foods to choose from, it’s hard to decide.  We didn’t really want to eat but can't pass this up.  Yes, prices are high like any airport and costly like everything in Europe.  Maybe the problem with food in America is precisely that it is too cheap, so we treat it like garbage.

It comes time to part from Irmgard and Alfred to catch our next flight. Hugs and farewells. "We'll see you in in ten days!", ten days from today Sept 1, 2001.

Back to our gate to board Air Lithuania for the flight on to Palanga right on the Baltic Sea.  I imagined that Air Lithuania would be pretty much on par with Aeroflot, the infamous Russian airline, in terms of outdated planes, non-existent service and generally the category of fly at your own risk; maybe even a chicken or goat onboard.  Will we make it alive?  Is there a real pilot flying the plane? Getting nervous!

Ch 2-1 On Our Way - Escape from Detroit Airport

By the time we reached our destination we’d see four airports and pass through two additional countries. Seeing airports in close succession makes the differences all the more striking.  At least the time change will work in our favor this trip, leaving in the afternoon and arriving in Lithuania late in the evening. We can get a night's sleep before starting the new day in a foreing land.

As we lived in Michigan it made sense to fly out of Detroit Metropolitan Airport.  Chicago’s O’Hare is about the same flight distance, but there's lot more road traffic getting there and flight connections no better.  around Chicago to get there.  Metro airport is under construction yet again so inside was a construction zone with much of the terminal blocked off.  We spared our relatives having to come see us off; none of them wanted along anyway.  They are very reticent about their German ancestry, actually in denial. 

Trying to find something to eat proved a challenge. A vegetarian I've lost interest in most food places, but these options set new lows for anything edible. It was going to be a long day of sitting and wanted a light meal. Lots of traveI but I rarely find anything edible in U.S. airport. 

I recall that Detroit got an award for having the fattest U.S. inhabitants.  I now know why.  Looking around at the menus and people I see why. Sullen mounds of flesh in polyester behind counters do their best to deter customers.  Doesn't work as zombie like lines of people wait for their infusion of high corn syrup and cholesterol. After a long search through this maze we find something suitable. I rush to the counter to wake up a staff person.  The rush was short lived - they were out of it!  At the other fast foods places staff was so slovenly dressed in grimy uniforms I was too disgusted to even try.  We settled on a beverage.  While we sat at a tiny table we observed the crowd shuffling along, dragging untied shoelaces of oversized athletic shoes, pants hanging low, not a good haircut in sight.  Flashback to George Romero's film with the zombies trudging through the mall.

Turns out we were fortunate not to have eaten anything when we become aware of the restroom situation: a bathroom so filthy as to be unusable. I actually wanted to get on the plane in order to use that restroom.  Here is the kicker – outside the filthy bathroom stood an attendant leaning immobile on her utility cart. When can we board and escape this purgatory.   It's a real downer to the start of a trip for which we have such great anticipation.

So why am I putting myself through this torture of airports and cramped airplanes, countless waits, running for shuttles, travel with an elderly mother, crammed into uncomfortable and inhumanely tight seats risking blood clots, airborne diseases and other unanticipated horrors?  I am taking my mother back home, to see where she spent her youth, attended school, moved to the city, explored, experienced, met and married her husband. Finding my roots.

Ch 1-2 Planning for Lithuania

Even though Grandmother Redetzki had nothing good to say about Lithuanians, it's clear from our genealogy that they were closer than Grandma let on.  My father’s homeland is in the portion still occupied by ethnic Russians. In the 1990's I considered a visit to the Russian area, Kaliningrad Oblast, with my East German cousin, Horst. Our fathers were brothers, worked the family farm and tavern in Groß Sodehnen (Grenzen). We each hoped to have some sort of cathartic experience by visiting our ancestral land.  On the other hand, both of us were born elsewhere as a direct result of the war and ensuring upheaval.

Travel to the Russian part and my father’s village was totally out of the question. Too many obstacles, crime, AIDS and high risk. The only way to get to Kaliningrad Oblast, the former East Prussia, from Germany was to drive directly across Poland, making sure the car wasn’t stolen from under us enroute.  Car rental companies cut the conversation short if you even breathed a hint of going to Poland. And it would be a long drive, not like taking the U.S. Interstate across three time zones in one day. More like two to three days just to drive across Poland! Then there are complications about crossing the Poland-Kaliningrad border - long waits! Days long! And the Klemm villages were mere memories, barren fields.

Now back to the internet and Lithuania.  Browsing around one day I encounter quite a few web sites on accommodations and sightseeing. My decision to see Memelland was made.  I wanted a sense of my roots, inspiration from a landscape that called up primal feelings of belonging, see the homesteads of my forefathers, make a connection with a past known only through a few small black and white photographs. And there were the stories told around a table filled with mother, father, aunts, cousins, smoke, pinochle and cognac.  Okay, I’m getting old and just wanted to see where my ancestors lived.  I never experienced a home with grandmother and grandfather or saw where my parents grew up.  I didn’t even know my own birthplace; it was the 1960’s before we even had a picture of the house in which I was born. This is the legacy of being displaced; you move to areas where you have no history, no geographic connection. Over in this mysterious Baltic land, five generations of family, on both sides, lived, laughed, loved, and died.

Were I to go alone I wouldn’t know the backstories on the places. I'd have factual information but no memories to make them significant.  It would be ordinary tourist sightseeing. So in spite of swearing never travel to with Mom again I asked her if she’d like to come along.  My father died fourteen years previous.

Mother responded hesitantly, but in the affirmative.  This had never been a possibility. Her concerns tied in to her memories of the country she was fled in the January winter of 1945. What was left to see?

“But the roads will be terrible.” "What kind of hotels can we get?”  Unspoken was her concept that Lithuania was very backward and not German civilized.

Even more alien to her was the concept of the internet. I can look up hotels, find a car rental, read a current sightseeing guide, and find a bed and breakfast right near her old village!  She found it incomprehensible. Computers were complex enough without trying to understand the internet. She doubted my findings and information sources. I had my own doubts, too.

Nevertheless, I plunged ahead with complete faith in this new medium called the internet. It was still the early days of using the Web, with more honesty and less dubious information. People were wonderfully naïve with the new technology. I booked airplane tickets through a consolidator, reservations made for the Bed and Breakfast, got a hotel for when we first landed, reserved a rental car with a local company (rates much better than Hertz) and checked out info on where to eat and what to see.  Lithuania already had a ‘Rough Guide’ out there!

We are set for a September departure from Detroit after high season and the weather will be mild. It's 2001. There are three separate legs on our flight itinerary, accommodations in place, ‘Rough Guide’ read, but this will be the most unprepared I’ve ever been for a trip as far as knowing details on background info and important sights. But what preparation do I really need – I have my mother.

Ch 1-1 Why Do I want to Visit Lithuania?

I was but a wee child when dragged from my home on a snowy Christmas Eve.  But wait, this story is only indirectly about me; it’s actually about my mother, her family, their lives as recounted by my mother.  And my father, he does play a big role, but I learn about his family through my mother. So, because I am telling the story of my mother’s stories, this rather does end up being about me, the narrator. Am I the product of what came before me? In reality yes due to the facts that led to my mother and father ever meeting; but what is the role of ancestral connections.

Onward! The trip is fraught with minefields. For starters, I'm traveling with my mother. Previous trips proved no matter how you try, you can't get away from old patterns of behavior. Those old resentments, hurts and sensitivities bubble up.

So why should I subject myself to this? Blame it on the fall of Communism and the internet. Countries previously off limit are now open for travel. No convoluted visa requirements to maneuver! The world wide web opens up sources of info for accommodations, sights, roads, and more. It is now part of Lithuania which really isn't of immediate interest but I wanted to know about that long forgotten piece of land known once as Memelland, part of East Prussia. In World War II the fate of this land was decided as were the other German eastern provinces. The powers that won the war were entangled in brinkmanship with the Soviet Union, the preliminaries to the Cold War. Control was given to the Soviets.

This area along the northeast Baltic Sea, closer to Scandinavia than mainland Germany, had a very different geography in the centuries before 1945. The main city and port was Konigsberg, city of Immanuel Kant. It was a thriving province rich in food production for mainland Germany.  There evolved the myth of the Prussians, an exaggeration of their 'traits' for precision and militarism. After the war the East Prussian province was split in half between Poland and the Soviet Union, who kept access to a Baltic port that wasn’t frozen most of the year.  

Lithuania was wired to the internet in 2001. I could see the country, explore, make travel plans while sitting at my desktop computer. What I could not do online was actual see in 3D, smell and experience the places my mother knew. I needed to go in person but needed her as guide.

I did have first hand experience with the Iron Curtain places. I was born in East Germany, the second place my parents had to abandon their home and flee. In my college years I studied in West Germany and was finally able to visit relatives that in communist stronghold of the German Democratic Republic (DDR) – the East Zone as my parents referred to it. My mother visited when her father died but my father didn't go back until 1971. I saw firsthand the contradictions of life under communism: travel restrictions, economic problems, rampant black market, political hypocrisy and corruption. Family living there were my only uncle, his wife and my only male cousin - separated, locked behind the heavy curtain of a proclaimed paradise.  

In the old days, visiting the GDR was complicated. First the convoluted process of getting a visa; had to be very specific on dates of entry and exit. Once I entered the country I was required to register with the police and exchange the required amount of US Dollars for East German Marks. I could shop at the local west currency store but had to pay in west currency. I had a bunch of east marks and nothing worth buying that I could take it out of the country. The only people who went to the GDR were those with relatives and students from Africa; not sure if they even had tourists from other eastern Bloc countries.