Impressions on Lithuania. A heritage trip in 2007

by Linda Morzillo.     

Heritage trip with Peggy Friedman and Howard Margol - June 2007

I left Albany at 2:20 PM on Wednesday June 13 and was in my hotel room at 1:10 PM on Thursday after a mostly uneventful trip.  I landed at Dulles just as a big thunderstorm was moving in and we waited 50 minutes on the tarmac for it to subside so we could unload at the gate.  I practically ran to the next flight to Copenhagen.  It left on time.  Fortunately I did not check any luggage; I usually travel with one carry on and a purse or tote bag.  In addition, that was a good decision because I traveled on United, SAS and Baltic Air, too many chances for luggage to get lost.  There were quite a number of people in our group who did not arrive with their luggage; it took up to four days to catch up.  We all traveled separately and met in Vilnius.

There were 40 people in the group and we were mostly from the states.  There were people from England, South Africa and Israel.  The leaders said that it was quite unusual that there were no Canadians.  This is the 14th time Howard Margol led the group.  Peggy Freedman was the co-leader and starting next year it will be Peggy who will be leading the group.  I believe I was the only one who came across the Atlantic for the first time.  There were several family groups, couples and people who came solo.  We ranged in age from 20 to over 80, a good group that mingled well.  One man I had met twice before and he was there with his sister.  

The breakup of the Soviet Union had its roots in Lithuania.  As a nation, along with the other Baltic nations Latvia and Estonia, Lithuania is trying very hard to be in the 21st century.  They are planning to switch their currency from Litas to Euros hopefully in 2008.  The economy is better than it was under the Soviets but people are hoping that it will improve more.  There is quite a bit of new building underway as well as restoration of the old.

It was decided that the phone system would be completely overhauled rather than just updated, so it is digital.  People walk around with cell phones and many are very fashionably dressed both in the cities and the countryside.  The people would not be out of place on an American street.  I saw no people dressed as I expected with grandma's housedresses and babushkas.  There are shoe stores galore!  I did see a couple of small malls but we did not go into them.  

Most people walk and take public transportation.  Even the most remote shtetl (small village), had a bus stop with regularly scheduled service.  We saw very  few overweight people because everyone walks most of the time.  

There are an increasing number of privately owned cars.  Lithuanians drive very, very, very bad, and at least around the cities, I would not drive.  Not enough traffic lights and people do things you would not believe.  

The countryside is lush and productive.  Most of it looks like western New York, southern Ontario and Ohio.  I would think I was near home until I noticed trees and birds were different than those at home.  And, of course, watched how people drove, yes, it is much worse that where YOU live.  There are tractors in the big fields and we did see people haying with horses and human labor.  Many people have excellent vegetable gardens and most gardeners outside the city have a sizable potato patch, too.  We saw one man hilling his potatoes with a horse and plow, his potato area was too small for a tractor.

Storks are nesting now.  You see them looking for insects in the fields as well as their big nests.  It was a problem when they were nesting on telephone poles and I believe they nested on roofs.  In people's yards in the countryside we saw tall poles topped with a platform and the storks were nesting on those.  At this time of year, the parents are busy feeding their chicks.

After the Soviets left, property reverted back to their original owners or their descendants.  The same is true of houses, our guides said that most people in Lithuania own their homes.  Most of the houses we would consider cheaply built and we also saw some that were more extravagant.  

Vilnius, the capital and cultural center, the center is a beautiful old city dating from the 1300's.  I remember reading Mark Twain - that when in Montreal, if you threw a rock in any direction, you would break a church window.  The same can be said of Vilnius (Vilna).  Kaunas (Kovno), is smaller, it does have an Old Town, but it is not as big or vibrant as the Old Town in Vilnius.  Raseiniai (Rossane, Rossany), was 95% or more destroyed in WW II and is mostly Soviet era construction.  Taurage was the other sizable town we visited, the rest were all small shtetls.  

The weather was like that of here, most days were pleasantly warm (70's and 80's) and we did have a couple of days of showers.

Our tour was specifically for people interested in the Jewish Heritage of Lithuania.  During free time I went exploring alone or with others who were interested in seeing the "rest of the story."  There is a Volkssporting Club in Lithuania, I did not contact the POC because I did not think I'd have time, wish I did.  I felt oriented and safe.  I am sure I covered the hot spots in both Vilnius and Kaunas with help from the guidebook, but I wish I had made the contact.  

Our itinerary consisted of stops at various sites pertaining to Jewish history and culture in Lithuania.  Note - the significance of these sites can often be found using Google or another search engine

The trip was essentially broken up into 3 parts:

1.  Vilnius:  State Historical Archives, soup kitchen, Jewish Community Center, Ezra Medical Center, the Room of the Righteous Christians, the only remaining Synagogue in Vilnius where many of us attended Sabbath services, walking tour of the former ghetto area, Jewish Holocaust Museum, Jewish Tolerance center, the pits at Ponar, and the Jewish Cemetery where the Gaon of Vilna is buried.

2.  Roots Tour:  We were assigned to little groups based on the particular towns we were interested in.  I was interested in Vidukle where my maternal grandmother was born and Raseiniai, the nearest larger town (a small city), where my great grandmother was living with her youngest daughter (Grandma's sister), and family at the beginning of World War II (more details after the next paragraph).  Ever since I began tracing my family trees about 30 years ago, I had always wanted to see where my maternal grandmother lived.  

3.  Kaunas:  Kaunas Archives, Slobodka Ghetto, IX Fort, "Blue" Synagogue built in 1890, the only Synagogue still standing in that city where most of us attended the short evening service, a short tour of Kaunas, the house where Chiune Sugihara lived and signed visas, Ziezmariai to see one of the remaining wooden synagogues remaining in Lithuania, and Trakai, ancient capital of Lithuania to learn about the Karaites and see the picturesque castle on Galve Lake.

The highlight of the trip for most of us was the Roots visit to our towns.  There were five of us; besides me there was Bernie, Rosa and Harris along with their twenty-something grandson.  We were assigned a driver and a guide, Roza.  She was also the lady who gave my group the walking tour of the former Vilnius Ghetto.  She speaks at least Lithuanian, Yiddish, Russian and English.  A lovely lady - we discovered that she is exactly a month older than I am.  She is here because her mother decided to escape the Vilnius Ghetto by making her way through the pipes and tunnels under the city and survived the war.  Before she retired, Roza was an engineer and now teaches people Yiddish, Jewish culture and guides visitors.  Roza knew how to find information and followed up on every clue to its fullest extent.  Our driver was a different story:  we were giving him directions using my map and Bernie's compass!  He was clueless!

You can copy and paste the following on your browser for a good map of the area.  Raseiniai is in the lower area of the center and the towns we visited surround it.

http://maps.takas.lt/?mapid=25&stepx=1&stepy=1&zoom=50&bigx=217&bigy=235&cmd=zin#map

On the first day of the roots tour we visited Tytuvenai and Siluva, towns that  Harris' family was interested in as well as Vidukle and Raseiniai.  In Tytuvenai, Roza called the high school history teacher, a man in his thirties, who showed us some sites.  What he did not know he found out by calling his mother.  The man was eager to practice his English, his brother lived in Philadelphia and he was planning to go to the USA for a visit.  Between the Catholic Church and the Russian Orthodox Church, both imposing structures, was the site of the synagogue.  The building replacing it is the Cultural Center - Soviet Era.  We found the cemetery between Tytuvenai and Siluva, apparently used by both towns.  It was quite large with many unreadable old stones.  In many places the newer stones had been taken away to be used a building materials after the war.  There were many wild flowers growing there.

In most of the towns the church is built at the head of the square, which was the marketplace.  Jewish homes and businesses usually lined up along the adjacent streets, close to the road.  That was because businesses operated out of homes and were as accessible as possible.  The ones with stone foundations were the old houses, just like old structures we find in Saratoga Springs and the surrounding area.  In all of the places we visited, there was quite of number of new houses.  Someone who had been away since before World War II would probably be amazed at the changes made since then.  That is true everywhere.

We arrived in Vidukle, there is a lovely impressive wooden structure at the town's entrance erected by the forest service.  The priest at the church was a young man and said that he did not know much about the history of the town.  He did know that the Jewish Cemetery is located next to the Christian one, as was the case in most of the towns we visited.  We walked up and down the main street pointing out which houses we thought were Jewish houses and which were not.  The town was larger than I thought it would be.  I do not know the exact location of my family's house.  My great grandfather was a tailor and they probably lived in the central area of the town.  I could imagine one of the old houses with a productive vegetable garden, chickens, geese, and perhaps a cow.

We saw an old lady sitting on a bench and Roza struck up a conversation with her.  Yes, she did live in this town a long time, yes; she was there during the war.  She could not remember where the synagogue used to be nor could she remember which were the Jewish houses.  She really did not want to talk with us.  Roza said that many of the people are afraid that the families of the former Jewish owners would reclaim their property.  They refuse to tell what they do know if that is a possibility.  It looked like the house the lady lived in was a former Jewish house.

We rode to where the cemetery was supposed to be.  There was a monument to the 300 or so Holocaust victims of Vidukle in a plot surrounded by a low fence.  We walked around looking for evidence of the cemetery, there was a hill on the left and a marshy area on the right.  We saw the caretaker of the Christian Cemetery cutting the grass and we went over to him.  Roza asked him questions and he pointed out exactly where we should look - on the hill.  We walked up the hill and I found the one remaining upright headstone that we could find at that time.  Bernie and Harris read that it was for Devorah (not my relative) who died around 1924.  We did not see anything else.  Walked back to our vehicle and started back when suddenly we saw a marker at the side of the road.  We looked around there and there were 3 more stones, one of which was mostly covered with dirt and moss.  We cleaned it off the best we could.  We could see the upright stone we saw earlier just a few yards away.  We took pictures so we can send them along to the people involved with the Jewishgen Cemetery Project - perhaps they can read the writing after enhancing the images.  It is quite probable that my great grandfather is buried there along with a brother of my grandmother who died as a young child.

Then we looked for the railroad station from where Grandma must have taken the train to America.  We did find it and we think there was an older station on the site before this Soviet Era station was built.  It did say Vidukle on it and there was a plaque commemorating how the Soviets deported some people to Siberia from that spot.

We checked into Karpyna, a small resort near Raseiniai, which specializes in raising carp.  There are facilities for meetings, tennis, fishing, swimming, etc.  Even though it was not as fancy as the other places we stayed, it was new and very clean.  We decided to go to Raseiniai to look around.  All of us had roots in that town.  Over 95% of that small city was destroyed during WW II.  The old cemetery is gone, there is an apartment complex on that spot, but I had done research and knew there was a marker.  Roza asked a couple of people and they knew exactly where it was.  The wall of the cemetery is still there in part and the plaque is on it.

We went to the area where the marketplace was located and found a short street with old houses on it.  Harris said that his great grandfather's family were builders and he had heard stories about him building in Raseiniai.  There were several old houses on that street and each had a covered well next to it.  They were probably Jewish houses before the war and some of the few structures that survived in that small city.  A young man showed us the site of the synagogue which now has a government building on it.

The next day we went back to Raseiniai to see the museum, I had researched its hours (closed Mondays), and its location.  The people working there were very helpful; they brought out all of the records that we would be interested in.  There were synagogue member lists from the later 1920's (Harris found his family but I did not, yes, I looked for the married surname of Grandma's sister), and a couple of other documents.  I took pictures of them.  There was a sizable Holocaust display in one room with pictures of people from that town taken before the war.  Most were typical family vacation pictures.  There were also pictures of Catholic clergy who may also have been victims.  We bought items in the gift shop, mostly woven table items unique to the Kaunas region, Roza said that they were a good buy.

Then we headed to Bernie's towns:  Girkalnis, Erzvilkas, and Taurage.  The first of those towns, Girkalnis, is on a rise and one can see Raseiniai in the distance.  The first two were small towns typically with the Catholic Church at the head of the square that served as a marketplace that was surrounded by older houses close to the road.  In Girkalnis the people at a corner store said that it used to be a Jewish owned store.  The cemetery in Girkalnis was about a five-minute ride outside of town and the one in Erzvilkas looked like the grass had been cut.  

Taurage is a small regional city.  There was a large Lutheran Church, a Catholic Church and a Russian Orthodox Church.  We did find the site of the Old Jewish Cemetery now covered by private homes.  Then we headed to our hotel in Kaunas.

There are satellite dishes everywhere.  

A nuclear power plant similar to that in Chernobyl supplies power  .  

One of the roots tours was at a town and was visiting the cemetery.  There was a group there from Dartmouth College restoring the site.  Of course, they had a conversation and learned that when the Dartmouth group arrived and started working, a group of Lithuanian people, mostly young, came and started helping them.  The general feeling of the Jewish community remaining in Lithuania is that the younger people are coming to terms with what happened.  I was aware that the Dartmouth College Hillel was involved in such projects because they had done a similar task in Lunna, Belarus, where my paternal grandmother's uncle lived with his family.  It looks like they are in Lithuania this year.

We attended Sabbath services at the Choral Synagogue in Vilnius.  The building is a work of art and the religious tradition is Orthodox.  Women had to sit upstairs or behind a curtain downstairs, I had not been in such an Orthodox place since I was a child living in the Bronx.  Us women in the group remember why none of us followed the Orthodox tradition.  Eight of the men in our group were honored with aliyahs, calls to say the blessing and to read the Torah.  Needless to say, none of the women were invited to do the same as is common today in Reform and Conservative synagogues.

There was a McDonalds near our second hotel in Vilnius.  There are coffee shops in convenient places.

When I went through passport control upon arriving in Vilnius, the customs lady asked me if I had health insurance.  I could not imagine why she was asking me that.  She informed me (as if I did not know this national disgrace), that many Americans did not have health insurance (and were dying in the streets)?  Now what was I supposed to say to that?  It turns out that things are not so good in Lithuania, people do have access to health care but it is difficult to find many medications or they are outrageously expensive.  The sponsors of the trip used to bring medicines for the Health Clinic but it is no longer allowed.  

At the Ponar pits and at the IX Fort there were new monuments commemorating the events in those places written in Hebrew and Yiddish besides Lithuanian and Russian and sometimes in other languages.  In the past, the victims were described as Russians only.  It was difficult to be at both places, there are bad vibes.  I get the same feeling when I visit Civil War battlefields where thousands perished.

Lithuanians LOVE ice cream.  There are venders everywhere in the cities.  During afternoon rush hour you see people eating pops (ice cream on a stick), and cones.  Sometimes the ice cream is laced with liquor.  The quality was very good.  

One of the gals, Mona, was able to find the stone marking her great grandfather's grave on her roots tour.

One of my fellow Raseiniai area roots tour companions, Bernie, plays the harmonica.  He serenaded us on that excursion as well as on the bus between Kaunas and Vilnius.  It reminded me of the times my dad used to play his harmonica, now owned by my brother, Randy.  We used to have sing-a-longs while he played Oh! Susanna and I've Been Working on the Railroad, to name a couple of songs.

Smoking is outlawed in restaurants as of 2006 or earlier this year.  Just as you see around here, people congregate by outside ashtrays to smoke.

Walking around during free time was the way to see things that were not a part of our tour.  The first hotel we stayed at was the Radisson Astoria owned by SAS.  Next to it on the right was the Turkish Embassy.  Walking up that street one saw two old churches; one had a plaque commemorating a visit by Pope John Paul II.  At the end of the cobblestone street was an arch, one of the entryways in and out of Vilnius when it was a walled city.  At the top of the archway was a chapel and the first time I walked there a women’s choir was singing.  Across the street from that same hotel there was a third church, undergoing renovations.  When I looked into it the organist was practicing (?) and many people were listening to the unexpected concert.

The food was OK, we decided we were going to grow gills and feathers.  Most of us will eat anything, but we did have a few people who ate vegetarian to abide by the Kosher dietary rules.  

Breakfast was the best meal and was always a buffet with smoked salmon (lox), scrambled, boiled and sometimes sunny side up eggs, bacon, sausages, chesses, breads, fruit (mixture of fresh and canned), cold and hot (seminola), cereals, juices, coffee and tea (they do not know decaf at all), Hotel Kaunas had the best breakfast which included three kinds of smoked fish and Lithuanian pancakes with curd (we call them blintzes).  Sautéed mushrooms were served as a breakfast item, the French word champignons was used.

Lunch was the big meal: appetizer, salad, clear soup, entrée and dessert. Dinner was at 8 each night and we had salad, entrée and dessert.  The portions were just the right size, compared to American restaurants; they were small.  Most of us use a doggy bag for our American restaurant leftovers and have enough for another meal.

The entrée usually consisted of fish or chicken, sometimes they were prepared better than at other times.  Vegetables were fresh and in season – lots of spinach, beans and crisp salads with mixed greens.  There was ice cream or cake for dessert.  Once we had a delicious mushroom soup made with fresh mushrooms.  The food was sometimes garnished with gooseberries, which Roza, our roots tour guide, informed us that they were very good.  They are pale orange, about the size of a cherry and slightly sour.  None of us ever had them before.

When we entered some of the restaurants we were given a shot glass of Lithuanian vodka to take to our seats.  It's better tasting than Russian vodka.

We had a couple of traditional Lithuanian lunches, I was surprised that several people in my group did not care for what we were served.  There was bread baked around a fish mixture with carrot bits that resembled and tasted like fresh gefilte fish, these were finger foods.  Then there were slices of cold potato with slices of herring, onions and sour cream.  The entrée was potato pancakes and sour cream.  They were similar to latkes except that the potatoes were mashed instead of grated.  There was sorbet for dessert.

When we were at Trakai to learn about the Karaites, we had a traditional lunch in their restaurant.  The foods were similar to ones we had as traditional Lithuanian foods: clear soup, salad, roasted chicken on a skewer, rolled cabbage, things that looked like turnovers or pasties filled with vegetables or chicken, vegetables and cake for dessert.   The cuisine of nearby Russia, Poland, and the Baltic area are quite similar to each other and it is easy to see that the Jewish cuisine has its origins in that region, it's the local fare!  Apples are used in many dishes in the fall.

The Lithuanian beer was excellent and was sold in .3 or .5 liter flutes and cost 4 Litas for .5 liters.  That's less than $2.00 USD.  One needs to be wary of the water, our hotels had filtered water and restaurants generally served bottled water.  Beer was definitely a more satisfying way to avoid dehydration.

An unexpected encounter occurred in Kaunas during my second visit to the post office during midday.  I went there to mail some post cards (which have not yet arrived as I write this).  I was standing in line when a group of women in front of me must've thought I was in the wrong line.  One of them started speaking to me in German (I think).  She gently took me by the arm and led me to a different line (much shorter), and I was finished in a couple of minutes.  It cost the equivalent of 20 cents for a post card to be mailed to here.  I told them Ah-choo! (thank you in Lithuanian) as I left.  I walked out the door and a lady started speaking to me in quite good English.  I was a little wary at first but we were in a very public place with scores of people around.  We had a 15-20 minute conversation; people do want to practice their English.  She asked me where I was from and about my visit to Lithuania.  I told her that I had come to see where my Grandma was born and was here with a group.  She seemed to be aware of the kinds of tour groups that did this.  It turned out that her name was Fruma and she is 74 years old.  During the war, she was about 9 and several Lithuanian families took turns hiding her.  I took her picture and showed it to our Lithuanian tour leaders and they knew Fruma but could not believe she spoke English.  The Jewish Community numbers about 5000 today, there were 250,000 before World War II.

We saw couples going somewhere to be married.  There was only one bride wearing a western style white gown, the others wore very stylish dresses and shoes.  They carried flowers and were trailed by relatives and friends.  At Trakai a bride wore bright red and was wearing matching 4-inch heels.  That wedding party had a limo and were there for the stunning photo opportunity,

Pack in one carry-on bag:  some people asked how I manage that.  Wear the clumsiest shoes (my good walking shoes on this trip, sometimes it's my hiking boots).  Each skirt and pair of slacks had two or three shirts to wear with them.  Believe it or not, nobody really cares how many times you wear something.  Black pants are dressy and can be worn with different shirts.  As it turned out, I could have left my black shoes and a pair of slacks at home.  Summer clothes are not bulky.  I wore a light fleece jacket tied around my waist; I do not think I put it on once during the trip.  Stick deodorant will pass muster at security as well as motel room shampoos and the sample size tubes of toothpaste from my dentist.  I took paperback books that I passed on when they were finished.  

The last evening some of us were walking around and there were groups of young people carrying flowers and mortarboards.  It looked like they just graduated from the University in Vilnius.  

Our hotels were all fairly new; all had hair dryers, and televisions (saw a glimpse of Tom Cruise speaking Lithuanian, western movies are dubbed).  Apparently the toilet paper is getting better; there were some places where it resembled thin paper towels, brown and rough.

One of the men, Craig, in our group, went to visit a second(?) cousin who still lived in Lithuania.  When the war started, her family (parent, parent's siblings and grandparents), moved to a new town and assumed new identities and a new religion.  They probably bought forged papers.  It was not until Craig contacted and started communicating with this cousin that she learned her true family history.  She is married and has a family.  The cousin made a traditional cake for him to share with us; it looked like a yeast cake that was rolled into strips, set into a coil pattern like some pottery and dome shaped at the top, allowed to rise and then baked.

Jeff (we met twice before this trip), and Sheila, a brother and sister, went to visit a woman one evening after supper.  Jeff has a friend who knew her; the lady is a teacher of English.  Sheila was unsure about going to the teacher's house, "but I am so glad I did."  The teacher came to pick them up and took them to her house where they had to eat (again).  "Try this…tell me if you like that…." They were well-off by Lithuanian standards and even had a swimming pool.  The woman travels to the states each summer for a few weeks to work as a hired companion for an elderly person.