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 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.
