Most Important Meal Ch 3/pg 4

Before we go to sleep we lay awake for a short time talking about our impressions so far. Mom realizes that this is not is the Lithuania she feared she would find. So far so good, and we are still in awe of the lovely Air Lithuania flight especially after the atrocious meal on Northwestern. Really seem food driven.
Morning comes! Breakfast! We are famished! Dressed and down to the main restaurant we go. There we find the large dining room set up for a buffet and full of – eh gads – Germans! It is a whole big tour group of them, so big it might be two groups actually. Okay, we’re now Americans for all practical purposes. Just like any large assembly of people, we want to stay clear of them. For that matter all groups exaggerate the worst qualities of any nationality when they congregate in large numbers. It seems so very odd being here in Lithuania and hearing all this German spoken. Somehow a bit out-of-place. I am in a non-German country and only hear German spoken.
We’re hungry so go check over the buffet before getting in line. What a lovely assortment. Hope we’re not drooling in anticipation. We’re just as happy as can be, especially if this is a sign of how things will be here. You may travel for the sights, but the food can make or break the trip. We just never really developed American taste buds. Unlike my travels through America, I have never lacked for good food in Europe. Wait, there was that one trip to Czechoslovakia – made the mistake of eating a sausage from an outdoor vendor. It was truly inedible; one chew brought to mind visions of Upton Sinclair’s infamous book about the meat packing industry. I spit out the awful gristle and threw the rest in the garbage bin. But that was just shortly after the fall. Western style competition had yet to take hold.

Ch 2 We Take Flight pg 7

The plane itself is a used American plane evidenced by the English language warning signs and markings.
I had no idea what awaited us in Lithuania. At least at this point in my life when traveling I have cash and charge cards so what can happen? This was a far cry from my student days where cash was tight and traveling cheap meant waiting around a lot to get into hostels. Had to get there early to make sure I got a cheap bed, otherwise where would I stay? I had no hotel backup. And now we don’t have to worry about being hauled off by the Stasi, or KGB, or whatever just because we are Americans, or do we? Are remnants of the old guard lurking in doorways waiting to nab us innocents?
Anyway, just how bad could a place be that is all over the internet? This is the first time I’ve used the internet for travel arrangements. I did have to write the bed and breakfast for confirm our reservations, but that was after seeing photos of the house online. It is amazing how quickly these countries became wired.
Then there is my mother, and she still worries about visiting a country that she knew fifty five years ago. It is still a country existing only in memories, a place where she never stayed in a hotel or ate in restaurants. Her family didn’t own a car; transport was by horse cart, foot, bike or train. Then there are the stories she’s heard and read about Germans who’ve traveled back in recent years when they were still a Soviet satellite. They tell of poverty and desolation and how difficult it was to secure any sort of transport to move about. These returnees didn’t like what they found. Mentally she is prepared for scenes similar to what she experienced on her trips to East Germany years ago – a colorless socialist monolithic; streets full of sullen, expressionless people; everyone watching what they said and who they talked to.

Ch 2 We Take Flight pg 6

makes us hungry. Yes, prices are high like any airport and costly like everything in Europe. Maybe the problem with food in America is precisely that it is too cheap, so we treat it like garbage.
We sit comfortably overlooking the concourse talking while we eat and drink. This is such a nice stopover treat. It is typical of them to be so thoughtful. They are both long retired, but the airport it is quite a drive from their home. It comes time to part from Irmgard and Alfred. Fond farewells, more hugs, and we’ll see them in ten days.
Back to our gate and we board Air Lithuania for the flight on to the city of Palanga, sited on the shores of the Baltic Sea. I imagined that Air Lithuania was an outfit that would be pretty much on par with Aeroflot, the infamous Russian airline, in terms of outdated planes, non-existent service and generally the category of fly at your own risk. Are there going to be goats and chickens squawking in the aisles? Will we make it alive? Will the pilot need assistance flying the airplane?
Was I ever in for a surprise. After some initial confusion at the gate, due to there being two flights were leaving for Lithuania at the same time – one for the capital city Vilnius and the other for Palanga, things were fine. Once on board it turned into a truly pleasant flight.
After a short time in the air we are served a cold plate for dinner. Lovely sandwiches made of hearty bread, smoked salmon and garnish. And to sweeten the palate, a tasty candy made by Kraft Foods in Lithuania – somehow reassuring to know that capitalists have already made inroads. For our beverage we get a beer. It is simple. It is delightful. It tastes wonderful. The staff is nicely attentive in a sort of throwback to air travel years ago.

Ch 1 Plan pg 6

1967, we couldn’t go to the East Zone. Those relatives we visited in Germany had new homes built for them as part of a major resettlement process after the war. This is the legacy of being displaced and having to move again and again due to politics or economics. Once a refugee, you seem to move continually, searching for home. You have no ties binding you to any one place any more. Over in this mysterious land close to the Baltic Sea, five generations of family, on both sides, had lived, and died.
But if I went alone I wouldn’t know where to look or know anything about our connection with this landscape. I would only be able to see everything in general, like any tourist in any destination. So, in spite of having sworn that I’d never travel with Mom again, I asked her if she’d like to come along. My father had now been dead for fourteen years, and he never really cared much for travel anyway.
Mother responded rather hesitantly, but in the affirmative. Her hesitation came from concerns that the country was just like what she remembered, after the war, in ruins.
“But the roads will be terrible.”
“What kind of hotels can we get?” Unspoken was her idea that Lithuania was still very backward and not German civilized.
She didn’t understand the internet. I can look up hotels, find a car rental, read a current sightseeing guide, and find a bed and breakfast right near her old village! It was all incomprehensible to her. The concept of getting on a computer and accessing a wealth of information not in books, but directly with other people, is still totally alien to her. And she doubted my findings and information sources. I had my own doubts, too.
Nevertheless I plunged ahead with faith on this new media called the internet. It was still the early days of using the Web, there was more honesty and less extraneous information.

Ch 1 Plan pg 5

But travel was totally out of the question due to so many obstacles, mainly simple logistics. The only way to get to Kaliningrad Oblast, the former East Prussia, from Germany was to drive, directly across Poland, making sure the car wasn’t stolen from under us enroute. My cousin wasn’t about to risk his family car. Car rental companies wouldn’t even talk to you if you even breathed a hint of Poland; too much risk. And it would be a long drive, not like taking the U.S. Interstate across three time zones in one day. More like two to three days to get through Poland alone!
Then try to get across the border into what effectively was Russia, for which you’d need visas with permission for specific dates of entry and exit. Anyway, we knew from the accounts of other travelers that the village where the Klemm family lived was gone. Sources on the internet, such as Russians from the area, warned me about the dangers of traveling through the Kaliningrad Oblast countryside. Also, they had major Aids and crime problems. Our dream trip never came to be. And things haven’t changed in that enclave of ethnic Russians clinging to a life slightly better than what Mother Russia offers.
So I decided I wanted to see old Memelland. I wanted a sense of my roots, be inspired by a landscape that would call up primal feelings of belonging, see the homesteads of my forefathers, make a living connection with a past known only by those small black and white photographs and tales told around a table filled with mother, father, aunts, cousins, smoke and cognac. Okay, I’m getting old and just wanted to see where my ancestors came from. I never experienced a home with grandmother and grandfather, or saw where parents grew up. It was the 1960’s before I even got to see a picture of the house where I was born. I didn’t even know my own birthplace. When we went back to Germany in

Ch1 Plan pg 4

And for the German tourist vacation destinations, would you rather lie on the beaches of Mediterranean Majorca or on the Baltic Sea in Lithuania – not a hard decision. After the war those cold communist resorts never attracted westerners – it was all so Socialist and drab and not really fun places on top of being just damned hard to gain entry into. They might not let you back out! You know – Capitalist pig trying to poison pure communist youth spreading drugs and corrupt musical influences. Most of the old resorts stayed alive serving the party faithful and the communist elite; they were choice locations for the party favorites who weren’t quite favored enough to warrant a trip to the west.
So Communism fails and these countries are suddenly open! While the economies of the Eastern countries are a wreck, they quickly learn that tourists bring money. And many tourists are interested in travel if only because it was off limits for so long.
Now that brings me back to the internet and Lithuania. Browsing around one day I encounter quite a few web sites devoted to accommodations and sightseeing in this region. I do that because my mother’s homeland sits in what is present day Lithuania. Even though Grandma had nothing good to say about Lithuanians, it was clear that the proximity was close in our genealogy, closer than Grandma let on. My father’s homeland is in the portion still occupied by ethnic Russians to this day. A few years ago I considered a visit to the Russian area, Kaliningrad Oblast, with my East German cousin. Our fathers were brothers, raised on the family farm and tavern back there. Both of us hoped to have some sort of cathartic experience by visiting our ancestral land. We probably longed for that connection to the family past that was denied us by the war. On the other hand, both of us were born as a direct result of those same circumstances. Had there been no war, we wouldn’t exist.

Ch 1 Plan pg 3

This area at the end of the Baltic Sea, closer to Scandinavia than mainland Germany, had a very different geography in the centuries before 1945. Between the Baltic States, Russia and Poland was the German Province of East Prussia. West Prussia was between Poland and Germany. After the war the province was divided up between Poland and the Soviet Union, who wanted to keep access to a major Baltic port for the reason that it wasn’t frozen for most of the year. This port was Konigsberg, once the principal city and administrative capital of East Prussia.
A small sliver of land in the northernmost area of the province, Memelland, where ownership was contested over many years went to Lithuania. The remaining southern portion of the province was given to Poland. And of course none of these divisions really mattered as it was all under the control of the Soviets, militarily, ideologically, and economically.
Since the days of detente between Germany and the Soviet Union in the 1970’s, tour groups began to shuffle aged Germans around the major sites of this former German province. No one other than these displaced Germans from the area wanted to go back. No one else had memories of the place. A new generation of Germans found it politically expedient to stop calling for the return of old German provinces. It offended the neighbors who now were friends. They need oil and gas from them and it was a great place to make loans with all that excess cash from the economic miracle that was now Germany. So you can’t have your neighbors thinking you want your land back. And Germany has finally learned that economic power is so much mightier with much better returns than military power.