Text of handwritten letter dated 12/18/03 from Mr. Kostas Burba to Mr. Yehoshua Trigor



Dear Mr. Yehoshua Trigor!

This letter is in response to Ms. Barbara Aharoni’s suggestion to write to you what I remember about Mazeikiai for your writing about the town. 

Our family moved to Lithuania from Russia in 1923 and my father Vladas Burba (V.B.) was appointed as a medical doctor to the hospital in Mazeikiai. The hospital was a very primitive old wooden house built by transferring two farmhouses into a joint structure. V.B. was the only doctor in the hospital and at that time he had to travel by “horse and buggy” to treat the sick in their homes and take all cases. Later V.B. convinced people to come to the hospital, rather than staying sick at home. He also urged the local administration to build a new, modern hospital. V.B. contributed much to the design and equipment of the new hospital with modern facilities. Rich people, particularly Jewish people used to go to hospitals in Konigsberg, (Kaliningrad) Germany or to Riga in Latvia. That changed when the new hospital in Mazeikiai was opened.

V.B. taught himself English from books and dictionaries and used medical literature from Chicago and England.

I was born October 10, 1916 in Kazan, Russia. Both of my parents were physicians and studied medicine in Kazan University. Late 1923
Our family emigrated to Lithuania. I went to school in Riga and studied engineering (electrical) in Kaunas. In 1944 when the Soviets returned to Lithuania we decided to move “temporarily” west. But at the last hour my father decided to stay. He was too attached to his patients and the new hospital.Only my wife Donata, our 3 month old daughter Mary and I left Mazeikiai, it was July 13,1944. At that time a mass exodus from Lithuania fled the coming Communists west to Germany. We expected starvation, bombing and an unknown future, but we luckily survived. After the war ended I traveled through West Germany looking for my parents, father, mother, and my father’s mother. Our correspondence was not delivered or was censored by the Soviets. I finally informed my parents where we were.

From 1944 to 1948 we (I, Donata, and Mary) lived in many places including Oslo, Linz, Goppinzen(sp?) and “displaced persons” (DP) camps in Germany. Since there was no future for us “foreigners” in Germany, we finally had luck to emigrate to the USA and started a new life from zero in Chicago with some help from local emigrants from Lithuania.

I visited Lithuania in 1977 on a 5 day side trip from Moscow where I was a member of the USA engineering delegation from my workplace. Later Donata and I and our daughters (Mary and Nora born 1956 in Chicago) visited Mazeikiai and Kaunas. My mother visited in Chicago in 1968 after my father’s death in Mazeikiai in 1966. She refused to stay with us, returned to Mazeikiai and died in 1974.

Heavy fighting went on in Mazeikiai in Oct 1944 (b.a.? Illegible date last number a 4??) My parents and grandma moved to a nearby village and V.B. bicycled daily to the hospital. Our two houses across from the hospital lot were destroyed and one was later rebuilt with a 15,000 rubel government loan. During the fighting my grandmother Judwiga 
(sp? L or J) was killed by artillery, my mother was wounded.

I remember some Jewish people in Mazeikiai :
* Joffe – a woman dentist
* Lampe- bakery and their white twisted bread”hala”.
* Guroic –photographer and his wife a physician
*Cico- old lady, spice shop keeper
*Glideman-cloth and material shop 
*Rachmel-had a store and an adjacent lot in the back of our property
*Eugenia Sauchatriste (sp?) from Sedi (sp?) attended school in Mazeikiai . Her father ,a physician, was saved by local people from the Germans. He had to hide in the church tower. Eugenia fled Kaunas in the first day of German occupation. She found a relative in Soviet Union, finished her medical studies and returned to Lithuania as an M.D. with the 16th “Lithuanian division”. To her big surpeise she found her father,stepmother ( a previous maid of the father) and two stepbrothers all alive. She married a lawyer M. Churges, has two sons and lives in Israel, Netanya..

My uncle Stanislaw Burba, a pharmacist also emigrated from Russia in 1923 to Lithuania. He worked for a short while in Kaunas, then moved with his family to Warszaw, Poland. He died there during the uprising against the Germans.

Dear Mr. Trigor please send me a copy of your finished writing about Mazeikiai.

Respectfully,
Kostas Burba