Ch 1 Plan pg 7

Airplane tickets were booked through a consolidator, reservations made for a Bed and Breakfast, got a hotel for when we first landed, reserved a rental car with a local company (rates much better than Hertz) and checked out info on where to eat and what to see. There was even a Rough Guide for Lithuania already out there!
Once again I thought about getting visas for us to travel to the eastern most area of Kaliningrad Oblast, where my father’s village once stood. The visa requirements were onerous. In addition to all the other bits of arcane information needed, we had to provide exact dates of arrival, of departure, where we were going, and pay lots of money for the privilege. From what I learned online, roads were bad, hotels nonexistent, and still plenty of crime problems. It was too much of a risk and bother, and to see what exactly? In Lithuania we didn’t know what we would find; in Kaliningrad Oblast, the former province of Stallupoenen (Ebenrode), we knew we’d find nothing.
Now we are all set for a September departure; the weather will be mild and rates low season. There will be less travel problems catching the tail end of the tourist season, so that’s why our trip is in early September of 2001. There are three separate legs to the flight, all reservations in place, Rough Guide read, but this will be the most unprepared I’ve ever been for a trip as far as knowing background info and important sights. I didn’t need to prepare myself reading loads of info – I have my mother.

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?