The following are a few excerpts from her reluctant memoir, translated from the Lithuanian by my mother ("G"). Her narrative begins in 1943 with Lithuania under German occupation and the Soviet front encroaching.
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V and I were
married in November, 1942. In August 1943, I went with my daughter, G, (10 months old) to stay on my parents' farm because it was no longer safe in the city. The Soviet army was very near.One evening, as the war front was approaching, V came to the farm and said the German army was taking any young Lithuanian men they could find. They had already come to his parents' home, but fortunately, he had not been there at the time.
The next morning, it was so hard leaving so many people dear to me: mother, father, brothers, sisters. The orchard was full of ripe cherries we had no time to pick. I still see everything so clearly, although many years have passed since that morning.
The war front was getting so close, we did not even wait for the bread my mother was baking for our trip. As we were climbing into the wagon, she tied a scarf around her little granddaughter and handed me a bowl of scrambled eggs for breakfast.
As we pulled away from the farm, my mother knelt by the gate and prayed. I kept looking back and cried until I had no more tears.
The farm was about 8 kilometers from the German border. It was a beautiful morning. We were four wagon loads of families. We were hoping to reach a train station in Germany, sell our horses and wagons, and move away from the war front by train.We encountered many other people on the road fleeing. Sometimes planes would shoot and drop bombs on these groups of refugees, but we were very lucky and were not hit.
. . . Sometimes good-hearted German farmers would let us spend the night. One family let me and G sleep inside their home, while the rest of our group slept in the barn. That night the Soviets bombed the nearby town. I was so frightened, that I would have preferred being in the barn with the others. Through the cracks in the barn wall, they saw the planes dropping bombs and the town burning.
My grandparents eventually made it to Insterburg, where they sold their horses and wagon and boarded the first in a series of trains they hoped would take them as far away from the war front as possible. They often slept on railway station floors, once living for a week in the Vienna train station, which was bombed shortly after they left.
They spent the winter at a refugee camp in Kaufenburg (Austria?), crowded into barracks with countless other refugees. My grandmother was in the beginning of her second pregnancy when she left Lithuania, and in the spring of 1945, my uncle, V, was born in the "hospital" barrack of this refugee camp.
. . . Frequently at night in bed, I thought about my parents, brothers, and sisters. We knew nothing about what had happened to them. It had been a whole year since we had been to church. Each day was the same as the day before.
The Soviet army was very close now, but the Germans would not let us go because they needed the men for their factory, which was manufacturing tanks. We could see the fires at the war front in the evenings and were anxious to flee. Finally, everyone was allowed to go. In mid April, we left Kaufenburg.
After leaving the refugee camp at Kaufenburg, the family took another series of trains, this time, in open-air wagons. There were several close calls during which they almost became separated (not an uncommon occurence). They ended up in the town of Illertisen, where they were taken in by a German family.
We arrived in Illertisen in the evening, with little V crying terribly because he was hungry and I had nothing to give him but tea. I couldn't nurse him almost from the time he was born. We lived with a German family there until August, 1945.
Soon after we came here, the Americans arrived. One evening we heard shooting outside. All of us ran to the basement. The German woman and I pulled out our rosaries and started praying. American soldiers entered the basement with guns pointed at us and shouted to put our hands up. After looking around, they left. The Germans were thanking God the war was finally ending. It was May, 1945.
We began inquiring after the family we had left behind in Lithuania. If someone went to visit a neighboring refugee camp, we would give them a list of names. We found out that my parents, brothers, and sisters had been deported to Siberia because the Soviets were taking over the farms for collectivization. This was agonizing news.
My parents died in Siberia. My sister eventually wrote to tell me that my mother was still alive to receive a package of clothing and a photograph of our family that we had sent. She was very sick, but so happy to see the photo of us.
My grandparents eventually emigrated to America in 1947, when a relative already living in Brooklyn, New York, agreed to sponsor them until they could get on their feet. There was nothing for them to return to - Lithuania had been forcibly annexed to the Soviet Union and its borders were closed. My grandmother's parents' farm had been taken over and the family members that had stayed behind had been deported to the Siberian gulags (work camps).
Lithuania declared its independence from the Soviet Union in March of 1991, but my grandparents never returned.
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My grandmother passed away last week, and I was naively astounded by the initial weight of my grief.
She had been living with my parents for the past ten years, and I was lucky enough to see her several times a week. Still, I have regrets about words that could have been spoken and time that could have been more wisely spent.
I still expect to see her rounding the corner towards my parents' kitchen with her teacup and rosary in hand, and I still wake each morning to a few seconds of suspended time during which she is still in my world.
I would love to sit with her just once more and listen, this time fully present and engaged, to the stories of her youth - stories that she told with more frequency and urgency during these last few years when her past began more and more to encroach on the present.
My grandmother was remarkably lucid and in good health for a person of her age, but in the weeks before she passed away, she would often say that she sensed her parents' farm close by and felt almost as if she could get there on foot.
She was right in believing she was getting close to home.
One of the things that gives me the greatest peace now is the image, in my mind's eye, of her mother rushing to greet her at the gate.
The Family before Sailing for America
My Uncle and Mother on the Boat to America
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Thank you to all of you who emailed or left comments expressing your sympathy. I had closed comments on the post about my grandmother's death, not realizing how comforting your words would be. And so I thank you from the bottom of my heart!
