Ch 2 We Take Flight pg 5

relegated to the long line of non-EU people. Oh how I long for the good old days when your U.S. passport entitled you to a speedy transit pass all the poor huddled masses clinging to hope of entry. This Euroland thing doesn’t favor Americans. Maybe I should look into getting back my German citizenship so I can take the fast lane. When my parents took U.S. citizenship sliding us kids through, we had to renounce previous country allegiances. Don’t have to do that anymore. Doesn’t quite seem fair to those who naturalized earlier. Why can’t we have dual citizenship?
Next stop – Hamburg, Germany, a city I always love to visit. I selected this transit point instead of Berlin as it will allow us an extra night on the return trip for a stopover with relatives north of the city up towards Kiel. We have plenty of time so Mom and I just amble around the airport. Suddenly, I hear someone calling across the concourse “Tante Edith”! Walking towards us across the broad expanse are two familiar people! It is my cousin Irmgard and her husband Alfred. This is so totally unexpected! Irmgard was my father’s favorite niece. What a delight! We would have seen them on our return trip anyway, but they decided to surprise us on our stopover. Warm hugs and welcomes all around.
We catch up on family news, and work to quickly get our German back up to speed. Up the stairs we go to a cafeteria on the mezzanine. There we have a view over the airy, open main concourse. The food service is all very posh with a heavenly assortment of food and drink – beer, wine, champagne, of course, we’re clearly in Europe now!
The staff is dressed in crisp white shirts, black vests, pants and bow ties. Typical service staff they are foreign, non-German, but classy. Mom and I find so much to choose from, it’s hard for us to make a decision. We didn’t really want to eat, but this luscious display

Ch 2 We Take Flight pg 2

remotely edible. Finally, in the maze we did find something suitable, and I rushed forward to wake up a staff person. The rush was short-lived - they were out of it! At the other fast foods places the staff was so slovenly dressed in grimy uniforms I was too disgusted to even bring myself to try to get clarification of the meager offerings. We finally settled on a beverage. And there we sat a the tiny table for two, among the hoards shuffling past, dragging untied shoelaces of oversized athletic shoes, pants hanging dangerously low, not a good haircut in sight. I had a flashback to a George Romero film where zombies trudge through the mall. In all my traveling over the years I’ve rarely had a good food experience at any U.S. airport. No point talking about train or bus stations (once briefly during my student days) Wait, Union Station in Washington D.C. did have some nice restaurants in their newly remodeled version, so maybe there is hope. It is most appalling when coming back from Europe; even street vendors have better offerings than U.S. airports. Victoria Train Station in London has amazing restaurants with great food! So what’s the deal? Some would say that the food isn’t any better in the U.S. even when you get out of the airport. Hmmm. That could be; I pack a cooler when I go on road trips and most my food stops are at grocery stores. But then I have the dogs waiting in the vehicle and am not suitably for more than a Flying J truck stop. Turns out it was fortunate we didn’t eat especially when we become aware of the restroom situation in the airport terminal. The bathroom is so filthy as to be unusable. First time I ever actually wanted to get on the plane in order to use the restroom. Mom and I are both eager to board our flight just to escape this purgatory. Enough ranting

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 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.

Ch 1 Plan pg 2

The hypocrisy of communist ideology was that for any capitalist currency, like dollars, they quickly put aside their ideals. I could visit, but they couldn’t dream of coming out the other way. Any travel wasn’t easy. I needed a special visa just to visit relatives. Fortunately I could stay family with as hotels were scarce; foreign had to use specially designated hotels. Once you got the visa you could only be in certain parts of the country, couldn’t travel outside the county or province. And then I had to register with police in the county seat upon reaching my destination and before I left.
Oh yeah, and then there were the U.S. State Department warnings about the risk of being kidnapped and held for ransom by the communist menace. For years my father refused to go back, but that was mainly out of fear of not being able to get out again. He had enough of being held by the Soviets. Years in a prisoner of war camp and the life in the GDR were more than enough up close and personal time.
All said, these had not been good places to visit, especially when so many other countries actively encouraged travel, not discouraged it. You only went east to see relatives, or if you were the odd person in complete denial about the benefits of living in a worker’s paradise.
Well, then comes 1992 and communism collapses. This affords opportunities for entrepreneurs, western investment money and tourists! Initially, in Lithuania, tourists are only Germans who long to go back to rekindle memories of the places they left in their youth, as fast as they could run at the end of the war when Russian troops pushed them west. To the rest of the world these places are pretty unknown; they are so isolated geographically at the east end of the Baltic Sea. And they lack infrastructure necessary for tourism. So who would go there?

Ch 1 PLAN pg 1

I started out as a child. But this story isn’t about me; it’s about my mother, her family,, their lives. And my father, he has a major role. Somehow this story where I’m retelling my mother’s stories ends up with a lot about me. I do enlighten, expand, give some historical background and of course, provide a running commentary. So it might have indirectly turned out to be about me. But I am the product of what came before me – and therein in the point.
There in the ether, on the internet, I discovered the country of Lithuania. Well, I did already know it existed, plus a little more about the country than your average American. Mostly I knew it in the context of a country my grandmother steadfastly maintained we had no connection with whatsoever! Not in any way shape or form. Ever!
The country has been part of the Soviet empire since the last days of World War II when the Allied Forces let the Red Army keep all the land they quickly occupied (along with all of Eastern Europe). The result was the country was largely closed to outsiders to keep the noble workers free from a scurrilous plague called capitalism. They were behind Churchill’s infamous ‘Iron Curtain’. I knew about this curtain of communism as a place where I was born and a place my family had to flee twice. It was only in my college years I was finally able to visit relatives in the staunchest communist country of all: the German Democratic Republic (that other half of Germany). So I knew about real life under communism: travel obstacles, economic problems life under a totalitarian political and economic regime. I had family over there – uncle, aunt, cousin – separated, locked behind the curtain of the workers paradise. Why do people have to be locked up in paradise so that they’ll stay?