Siaulenai, Lithuania

When I was a little girl, like all little girls, I wanted to walk in my mother's shoes.  This past May, I did.  I walked in my mother's shoes.  I walked in my grandmother's shoes.  I walked in my great-grandmother's shoes.  I walked their walk in a place called  Shavlan, Lithuania, the shtetl of my ancestors.

"Mom!  Where did you live before you came to America?"

She was in the garden cutting some lilacs from the lilac bush we had in front of our house in Baltimore.

"In a small town called Shavlan in Lithuania," she answered as a sudden far away look came over her. 

This question I remember asking her when I was no more than seven years old. In the second grade, the students had to write down their parents' names and what country they were born in. So, at the very young age of seven, I quickly learned how to spell Lithuania. 

When I was a child. I asked my mother and grandmother many questions about the town Shavlan and heard many stories about their lives there in the early nineteen hundreds.  My grandmother was a very smart woman and in 1923 decided to leave Lithuania for America because she had a premonition that there would be another war and the Jews would once again suffer as they had suffered before in the so-called Great War (World War I 1914-1918).

I used to think about Shavlan and try to picture what it looked like and how life existed for all the Jews in that small shtetl.  My imagination would run away with me, and I would picture my grandmother baking her breads and pastries and going to the marketplace in the center of town.  She told me she had a stall there and would sell her baked goods each morning to make a living.  My mother had said that in 1915 she, her mother, brother and sisters, along with the rest of the Jews from her village, were transported to Ekatrinislav, approximately 500 miles away deep

Into the territory of Southwest Russia.  It seems that the Russians were fearful that the Jews in the towns in Lithuania would collaborate with the Germans so many Jews from various villages were sent away for the duration of the war.  Yes, there were many stories told to me about the hardships that existed for them in the old country.  None of which were very happy from what I could gather.  Coming to America was the smartest thing my grandmother could have done.  Although she could not have known then, this decision to leave Shavlan for America would turn out to be the decision that saved her entire family from the fate of the rest of the Jews there who did not leave.

During the past several years I have become very interested in my ancestral town, Shavlan.  Unfortunately, there are no grandmothers, mothers, aunts or uncles left to ask the many questions I have accumulated in my mind which are unanswered and perhaps will remain unanswered forever. 

When did the family settle in Shavlan?

Did the relatives live in other nearby towns?

Did they know about any other ancestors in Lithuania or elsewhere?

Etc., etc.

Last year I decided to write down the stories I heard from the family so that my children and grandchildren would know where their ancestors came from and how they lived.  I began to write down what I could remember them telling me.  But somehow it could not come together.  If I could only go to Shavlan and walk in their footsteps, listen to the sounds of the cows mooing and roosters crowing, visit the marketplace where my grandmother stood daily to sell her baked goods, and walk to the cemetery to visit the graves of my ancestors.  But the town may not exist now.  There would be nothing there to see.

Through research, I discovered that Shavlan did, in fact, still exist. The Lithuanian name for Shavlan is Siaulenai.  Shavlan had an old wooden synagogue built in the mid-seventeenth century.  It had a beautiful holy ark of carved wood.  But the synagogue was destroyed. However, the marketplace and Jewish cemetery did survive.

My husband and I were planning a trip to Prague in May 1996, and we decided to make Lithuania a side trip. So through a travel agency in Chicago, I arranged to have an English-speaking guide, along with a driver, meet us in Vilnius (Vilna) and take us to specific places we wished to see in Lithuania.  This was much better than an arranged tour, since I mainly wanted to see Shavlan and its surrounding areas. 

On May 16, 1996 we arrived in Vilnius airport and were met by our guide Elona and driver Gunther.  Since we had only four days to spend in Lithuania, we decided to go directly to Kaunas (Kovna) which was 1 1/2 hours from Vilnius.   Shavlan, my ancestral town was approximately one hour away from Kaunas, and it made good sense to begin our trip there first in order to spend as much time in Shavlan as possible. 

We immediately began our journey to Kaunas.  The roads were surprisingly good.  It was Spring in Lithuania and the countryside was full of lilac trees and bushes in full bloom.  The aroma from the sweet smelling lilacs overwhelmed me, and I could not help but think of the lilac bush my mother had outside our house in Baltimore when I was a child.   The lilacs represented to her the only good memory of Shavlan.  And perhaps the only good memory she wished to hold on to which did not cause her pain to remember.

The time flew by quickly and before we knew it, we were in Kaunas.  The driver stopped in front of our hotel, which was located very close to the old town hall.  We agreed to have Elona and Gunther meet us at 9:00 o'clock the next morning so that we could begin our journey to Shavlan early.  We said goodbye and proceeded up the steps to the hotel.  As we approached the front desk to register, we could not help but notice a man standing nearby with a revolver in a black, shiny holster wrapped around his waist.  We thought that either he was part of the mafia we had heard so much about or that the hotel management had engaged a guard to stand watch to make sure that no undesirables came into the establishment.  As had been pointed out to us prior to our trip, hotel rooms in Lithuania were broken into frequently by the ex-KGB and valuables were stolen from the luggage while the guests were in their rooms asleep.  Despite the armed guard, however, we did not feel at all threatened and proceeded to our hotel room to unpack.  After dinner in the hotel restaurant, we retired for the night. 

The next morning, bright and early, Elona and Gunther met us, and we were on our way to Shavlan.  Elona had arranged for us to pick up Liebe Lipsic, a Jewish concentration camp survivor who returned to Lithuania after the war and settled once again in his town, Siauliai.  Mr. Lipsic read Hebrew and was needed to interpret the writings on the headstones in the cemetery in Shavlan.  Maybe I would be lucky and find the burial plot of my great-grandmother and perhaps other ancestors as well.

Once again the roads were very good and once again the roadsides were covered with beautiful lilacs.  As we traveled towards our destination, the town signs began to appear. Klaipeda!  Kedainai!  These were familiar towns we had remembered reading on the map of Lithuania when we first began planning our trip.  Finally, the sign Siaulenai appeared.   My heart began to throb, as I knew that Shavlan was Siaulenai in Lithuanian, and we were passing by my ancestral town.  We continued on the road passed Shavlan to Siauliai to pick up Mr. Lipsic.  Within a half hour, we were in Siauliai and, as we waited in the car, Elona went to get Mr. Lipsic.  After lunch in Siauliai, we continued on to Shavlan. 

The countryside was very flat with farms everywhere.  However, the land was barren.  Our guide Elona told us that when the Soviets left, the land was given back to the families who owned it before, but the children of the land owners did not know how to farm and so the land is uncultivated, and the young owners are just hanging on to the property in hopes that someone will come along and buy the land and make them wealthy.  

Suddenly, before my eyes, there stood the sign, Siaulenai (Shavlan).¹  There was the fork in the road with three roads leading to different towns, exactly as I had read about in a description of Shavlan.

The town was very small and surrounded by farms.  Along the roadside stood a black and white cow mooing.  In the background we heard roosters crowing.  Two children were playing in the pasture.  We asked them why they were not at school and they shouted, "Because we do not feel like going today". 

We asked a rather young woman standing near a broken down barn if she could tell us if there were any old people in the area who could remember what the town was like in the early nineteen hundreds.  She pointed up the road to an old wooden shack² and told us that a ninety-year old woman lives there who could tell us what we wanted to know.  After thanking her, we began our walk up the road toward the house.  Elona, our guide, knocked on the door.  A very old lady came out wearing a dreary brown babushka³ upon her head.  It looked as though she had stepped out of the nineteenth century.  We introduced ourselves, remembering not to say anything about our relatives owning property there, as we were told that the residents of these old houses feared that we were there to take their homes away from them.  She appeared to be very friendly and quite inquisitive.  We asked her if she remembered the Jews who lived there many years ago.  I told her that my grandmother owned a bakery there between 1920 and 1923.   She told my interpreter that she did remember a woman who had three daughters and a son who lived in the bakery.  I began to get very excited, but then she said their name was Lackman.  My family's name was Grazutis.  There, for a fleeting moment, my mind went back in history, and I could picture my grandmother, mother, two aunts and uncle selling bread to this old woman and her family.  

The old woman started talking about the Jews who lived in the village before the Second World War and how everyone lived together.  She suddenly began to cry as she related the stories about when the Germans came into town and took away all the Jews.  She said that a few of the old people still living in town get together and reminisce about the times when the Jewish women would visit and drink tea.  It seemed obvious that she was very upset going back in time to those horrible days during the war.  Her tears appeared to us to be sincere. 

I asked if I could come into her house.  She happily motioned for us to enter.  I was very curious to see how the place looked as I realized it was at least 100 years old.  As we entered, I was shocked as was our guide,  Elona.  There was no heat, electricity, running water, or toilet facilities.  The inside consisted of four small rooms, a kitchen with a wood burning stove,⁴ two bedrooms⁵ and another small room with an old spinning wheel.⁶   Now, I could picture what the inside of the houses looked like in the late eighteen hundreds.  Nothing had changed, except perhaps the condition of the house.  She told us that there was no one to plant the crops or cut the firewood.  This woman appeared to be totally alone except for the neighbors who, from time to time, helped her out.  We thanked her for showing us her house and gave her a few dollars for her time.

We continued up the road.  The road where "once they walked".  It was a very short road with a row of newer houses on the side.⁷  When we arrived at the top of the road, there stood, on the right hand side, “the marketplace".⁸  However, the only thing sold there that day was baby chicks.  A man in an old car had a crate of over one hundred baby chicks and people from the area were buying them.  My imagination once again took hold of me.  I pictured my grandmother standing there behind an old wooden stall, selling her breads. "Lets go to the cemetery now", a voice uttered from behind.  I was startled at first until I realized it was my husband talking to me.