The land is sectioned into large farm collectives, a hallmark of the communist agricultural system. And before anyone could begin to farm, the homes were ravaged first by invading Russian troops and then what ever was left plundered by Lithuanians. They didn’t receive U.S. aid packages after the war’s end and there was no Marshall plan for Eastern Europe. The Russian liberators had no economic recovery for them; their goal was to appropriate anything of value and everything they wanted. Entire factories were shipped back to Russia. Many secondary roads vanished under collective fields. Years of plowing removed all traces of farmhouses and the German culture that once thrived there.
Signage is also pretty sparse. Side roads aren’t marked and this lane where we parked just sort of peters out. I can’t tell whether this gravel road is now actually a country lane or the driveway back to a farmstead nestled at the edge of the woods. Back at the site of the Redetzki farm, we park the car and stand on the road looking out at the fields. We can’t walk into the field because of tall, thick weeds growing at the road edge blocking passage. I listen as my mother talks about that fox that killed their geese then went and laid them by that ditch that cut through the field behind the barn. The fresh geese were to have been sold with the money used for Christmas; now they were dead and useless as income.
This lane was lined with farmsteads all the way back to the corner with Ramutterstr. where the two schools stand. The fields around the houses were small; that’s where they planted the more important crops. Land here was too valuable to waste on inexpensive crops so hayfields were located quite a distance away on cheaper land.
Leaving the car, we walk down the lane as Mom tells more stories. There was a young neighbor boy who always bothered Herta as they walked to school. One day, returning home from school, she finally had her fill of his pestering. She confronted him and gave him a big push into a thorny shrub in the ditch. Plitsch! That cured him. Now here we stand at a bush next to that very ditch. It can’t be that exact same bush, but it looks right and helps the story. Bullies and squabbles among kids on the long walk to school - many things don’t change.
Winters were so hard and school so far away that her good, dear father would hitch up the sled to fetch them home protecting them from bitter, cold winds. It was to far for them to walk. And ever so fierce in the winter! So often I heard her lament of how far she had to walk to school every day. Thinking back to my own childhood, I can still hear her tell me year after year a story of the difficult, long walk, a veritable march of endurance, that was their daily walk to school.
I peer down the road off to her school sitting at the intersection. Then I look back to the farm site. “Hmmm. That’s funny. It doesn’t really look all that far,” I point out.
I walked many streets in Detroit to reach elementary school, then later to junior high which was located exactly one mile away, and then I walked to high school through rain, sleet, snow and adolescence. Once more I stare to the end of this dirt road.
I proclaim loudly, “Mom, you know, I had further to walk to school than you did!”
Disbelief struck her hard. In her memory the distance is oh, so, far - in actual distance and now also in memory years. The distance increases and the memory intensifies. How could something so fervently remembered be wrong?
She can’t believe it, but is now faced with the actual road and school which seems to belie what she remembers.
“Get in the car. Check the mileage on the car” she tells me.
Slowly, we drive down the lane to the corner in question. The odometer clicks each tenth of a kilometer. Tick, tick, digit by digit. Aha, here we are at last, at the corner. And the result is…
She doesn’t like the result. We must be doing something wrong. It can’t be right. Back I go, drive the exact same way out to where the farm stood. The odometer is now carefully watched by both of us. Turns out it is only a bit over half a kilometer! Unbelievable! We laugh!
Ah, but she is quick with an explanation: “Little feet have to walk more so it seems longer.”
All those years I felt bad for those poor children who had it so hard. I had it easy with sidewalks and streets and only one mile. I think I imagined there must have been wolves chasing the little children, so dire did it sound. Now I discover that I was the one who endured long walks, and much longer walks! And no sleigh ever came to pick me up. I even think winters were colder in Detroit, Michigan. Perhaps it was better I didn’t know this in my own youth; not knowing for sure, I couldn’t argue about it.
It was probably better that there was no farmhouse to see, that nothing stood from the past. Memories remained intact not to be upset by a hard reality of seeing what things really look like. Judging by what we see along the roads many of the old farms are in extreme need of repair. This country probably fared worse than other communist regimes being so remote. All production was decided by a central authority, not by consumer need, so construction goods weren’t produced. I know this to be the case firsthand from my East German relatives.
We go for a closer look
at the school buildings. The older of the two has been converted to a residence
and is currently occupied. With the reduced population it has more use as a
residence than school. The new schoolhouse, where my mother spent most of her
schooldays, appears to still be used as a school, but I can’t see any signage
to verify this. It looks like the traditional country school of East Prussia –
room for the school, living quarters for the teacher, garden area and probably
once a stall for horses and a few livestock. The gardens now look a little too
formal for school landscaping. There are no people around so no opportunity to
ask questions or maybe go inside.
As we stand at the intersection an old woman rides up on a bicycle. She speaks to us but we have no idea what she is saying. Maybe she is telling us to get out of the road. Her gestures and expressions seem friendly, not threatening or hostile. It is disappointing not to be able to converse and ask questions especially as she seems old enough to have lived through the war. Perhaps she had been a resident of one of the missing towns.
I’m cautious about going up to the homes of Lithuanians due to issues in connection with land ownership in the post Communist era. In East Germany, West Germans come back to lay claim to their properties lost after World War II. Who ever thought they had a chance in hell of ever going back to these homes, let alone try to seize their long lost property? Many of these pre-War occupants aren’t interested in actually moving back into the old family homestead - they have their own homes and property in the west. But greed and the chance to turn a profit motivates them; they want to make quick money by selling it back to the people currently living in the house. This is also happening in the Baltic region. When a German comes knocking on your door, it may be to case the place then file a claim of ownership. Our interest is in refreshing memories and closing gaps, not getting details for repossession.
Generally, Europeans are not as friendly with strangers as are Americans. We disclose a lot of information to strangers, even the government, to the media, and to people we meet on a trip going so far as to invite them to visit. Europeans don’t disclose anything. I’ve partied with British people a whole evening without their asking me a single personal question.
Traveling with my East German cousin’s son Stefan on his first trip after reunification, I found it odd that he didn’t speak to Germans we met on our trip thru America. When asked why, he replied they probably would notice his East German dialect then wouldn’t talk to him. On the other hand, Americans we met were eager to try out their meager German on him, while other Germans gave him the cold shoulder. Same thing happened when his parents came to visit. My cousin Horst told me he didn’t talk to Germans tourists because it wasn’t any of his business. But he marveled at how I would just go up and talk to all sorts of people in a variety of places. I do it all the time to the amazement of friends; I enjoy the interactions and learn a lot.
Regarding land ownership, how do you actually determine who owns the land? War creates such turmoil and upheavals. For centuries ownership changed hands, on a national level and personal scale. How far back do we go to establish rights of ownership? How much time passes before claims are no longer valid? In the 21st century the changes will not result as much from wars caused migrations but be much more insidious. We’ll use economics, the internet and globalization to change the borders, make places more like each other, change languages into a global English, create tightly related financial markets, and drive out uneconomic home industries.
Who knows, maybe in a few years there will be a Korean car factory where once was Grabuppen. Then we can stop at the McDonalds before we try to find that electric pole in the field. As we eat our burger might we notice that the wind no longer blows over the heather of the Kallningken cemetery remains?
In the 1974 I got a visa for the GDR and hoped to travel to my own birthplace, Neumark in Sachsen by the Czech border. The only photos I’d seen of my birth house were taken in 1968 by a family friend. He traveled back to see his East German relatives left behind when he fled in the early 1960’s. In the photos the house looks so big – two stories, covered with the drab grey stucco typical in most German cities. The front stoop was the entrance to my father’s housewares store. We lived in an upstairs apartment. I think I was told we faced the courtyard around the back. No idea what the rooms inside looked like. No memories of the house for me as I was too young. My godmother, Marianne Popp still lived down the street a bit. Neumark was simply a way station in the history of our displaced family, somewhere my family had to live after the war. I couldn’t visit on the 1974 trip as my visa restricted me to Buttstädt. Neumark had to wait for another visit with a different visa.
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