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LEAVING LITHUANIA
Our school, the Art Institute in Kaunas, was closed by the Germans in 1944. By then the Germans were losing the war and retreating, the Soviets approaching, the times uncertain.
Four of his former students, three boys and I, invited our teacher, sculptor Vytautas Kasuba, to work with us during the summer in Jurbarkas. The studio we took over was that of the late sculptor Grybas, the building inside the town's park, the building's rear aligned with the brick wall that surrounded the park. Through that part of town ran the main highway to Germany, and by the fall of 1944 small groups of German soldiers would appear and ask for food. The park keeper, who lived in the main house across the yard from the studio, would take the cigarettes offered and come back with a piece of bread, a few apples, or something wrapped in paper. By September he would simply turn up his empty hands and the soldiers would walk away.
The times were so uncertain that we too had difficulty buying provisions. Already in August we started catching stray chickens. Since none of us had ever killed or plucked a chicken before and my colleagues could not stand the sight of blood, that became my task. Twisting a live chicken's neck until it broke in my hands felt like outright murder, so I let the axe do the job. The procedure took several steps. Holding the chicken by its legs, I would lay it flat on its side on the chopping block then, holding it down with one hand, with the other rhythmically tap a finger close to its head until the bird relaxed. Once the chicken was "hypnotized," it lay still for about ten seconds, time enough for me to grab the axe with both hands and severe the chicken's head in one stroke. We then dunked the dead chicken into a pail of boiling water to ease the removal of feathers and the boys took turns to pluck it. One boiled chicken and soup was enough for two or three days to feast on. When chickens were no longer to be seen, at nightfall we raided the surrounding fields, digging up potatoes or picking a pillowcase full of beans.
Leonas, one of the students, would disappear for several days and come back with goodies, a bag of flour, a sack of carrots or cabbage, or some eggs. He also brought news of the war. From him we learned that Kaunas, the capital city where my parents resided, was already deserted, people fleeing the approaching Soviet army either to the country or across the border to Germany. This was confirmed by families in horse-driven carts who, on their way to Germany, stopped in the yard to replenish supplies and rest the horses. One day our teacher's brother appeared with his family in a two-horse wagon, prepared to take Vytautas to Germany with them, but he declined and stayed with us. Likewise, a person I never met before had a message for me—my parents were leaving town, hoping to reach the place where my father's sister lived. I no longer had a home to go back to.
One day Leonas returned from a trip with the news that he had purchased a pig. The farmer was to butcher it the next morning and it had to be picked up that same afternoon. It was agreed that I should pick it up, as young males seen by Germans during the day were taken on the spot and sent to the front.
Next day at noon I set out with an empty valise. I found the farm, a few kilometers out of town, and the pig was already butchered and cleaned but had to be chopped up into smaller pieces to fit into the valise. The farmer asked, do you want the gut? Will you make sausages? Yes, I said, having no idea how sausages were made. Two dogs followed me all the way to the country road licking the pink drippings off the valise. Instead of staying on the public road, I took the safer way home, the footpath by the river.
The river was already in shadow. Hardly able to lift the load off the ground, I walked slowly, often stopping to rest. After a bend in the river, the bank rose steeply and in the shadow of bushes three soldiers were lying, chatting and chuckling, hands tucked behind their heads. I was some eight yards away when one of the soldiers sat up and saw me. I stopped, put down the valise. Alerted, the two others sat up and the soldier who saw me first jumped to his feet rubbing his hands. I picked up the load and started walking, grossly limping as if in pain. The soldier who was rubbing his hands was about to lunge forward when the one sitting next to him grabbed him by the pants and held him back. Flies buzzing around me, I limped past them and reached the studio safely. We gave the fat to the keeper's wife who in turn instructed us how to make sausages and provided the equipment. We cooked parts of the pig and made sausages of the rest. We smoked the sausages in a communal smoking shack that had no lock and by the time the sausages were ready, most of them were gone. Fair enough—we took a little and we gave some back.
In October most of the fields were cleared and only hard winter apples could be found in the orchard behind the big house. We would collect them at dusk, cut them into thin slices and chop them up, then put the mush into a large pitcher and, after pouring hot water over it, let it steep. We drank the sour liquid and ate the warm pulp from one bowl before going to bed, the stub of a candle lit long enough to scrape the bowl clean. By the last week of our stay this was our only meal of the day.
The three boys and I slept on cots in the front room of the main house and our teacher in the sanatorium at a walking distance from the park. He was better off than we were, for he had two meals every day. Vytautas stayed in the sanatorium because in one of his lungs were signs of tuberculosis and every ten days air had to be pumped into the lung cavity, compression of the lung expected to prevent TB from getting virulent. Before that precautionary procedure could be applied, his private doctor had sent him to Berlin for an operation to remove the fibroids in the lung cavity grown during an earlier bout with pneumonia. The letter from the Berlin doctor was to open the doors to every hospital in Germany.
The studio was well equipped. It had a pit in the middle for larger works, a large box of clay still malleable, a work bench and four sturdy turntables. We spent our days in the studio, Vytautas working on his own project beside us.
At dusk we stopped working and our teacher would go home. I started to escort him on the path winding across a young pine forest to the sanatorium. At first Vytautas talked about his youthful escapades, then of the women in his life, observing me closely. I listened attentively, mostly in silence, until a dialogue began developing. When the path became too short for our conversations we took to walking it back and forth until night set in. One moon-lit evening I ran ahead and, arms raised to embrace the entire world, started rapping non-stop about how wise was the moon having looked at the earth for so long, how ancient were the whisper of pines, the shadows in their circular ways and so on and on, forgetting in the rush of words that Vytautas was there. He was standing way back, arms crossed on his chest. A bright smile was on his face when he caught up with me. We walked the rest of the path in silence, holding hands, student and teacher no longer.
In mid-October ground shaking, metal grinding sounds made us run to the back window. A tank was rolling down the road, the long artillery barrel aimed straight at us. The barrel stopped a yard short of the window, turned ninety degrees and moved away along the side of the building. A small group of listless soldiers was walking behind it. More tanks repeated the maneuver, soldiers riding the tanks exhausted, faces somber, hair disheveled. Nobody was in charge. The German army was retreating, going home, leaving Lithuania. It was time to decide—to stay or go into exile?
By dusk the road was empty. We were sitting on the steps still talking, when in the evening hush we heard Soviet soldiers singing, settling for the night beyond the hill. Though we never discussed it, Vytautas and I decided to go into exile together. This decision sealed our relationship.
It was dangerous for Vytautas to stay and risk deportation to a labor camp in Siberia. When the Soviets first invaded Lithuania he was permitted to model only busts of Lenin, his sculptor friend only Stalin, and neither could purchase materials for any other work. In their last days before the Germans entered Lithuania in June of 1941, the retreating Soviet army transported thousands of Lithuanians to labor camps in Siberia, mostly the country's intelligentsia and their families. During those very days Vytautas was in his parent's house, the family gathered to celebrate their father's birthday. Vytautas, who had arrived that morning from Kaunas, was in the kitchen when his father standing in the doorway shouted, the truck is here, run, jump out the window, and Vytautas did. Guns pointing, the Soviet soldiers entered the house and an hour later his older brother, a painter and teacher, his wife and their two small children were on the train to Siberia. That June the Germans invaded Lithuania and the German government commissioned Vytautas to create a work that symbolized Soviet cruelty. He sculpted a larger-than-life reclining mother with a dead child lying across her arm, the other hand reaching out for help. The figure, resting on a sarcophagus-like pedestal, was transported by truck from town to town throughout Lithuania. Everyone knew that the returning Soviets would make the sculptor pay for it.
During these crucial days my family was in Kaunas and I in Siauliai, left behind to finish the gymnasium (the equivalent of high school plus a year of college). Two of my cousins and I were having our mid-day meal when someone ran in to tell the cousins that their mother, father and younger brother were on the train already. The girls, both younger than I, put down their forks, got up and without a word left for the station to join their parents to Siberia. Ten years later they came back, married, with children.
That night in Jurbarkas, after hearing the Soviets sing, the student who lived in town jumped to his feet and ran home. The two others ran into the house to pick up their belongings and rushed back to say good-by to us. Before vanishing into the night, Leonas pressed a bundle of money into Vytautas's hand saying, you'll need it more than we. Vytautas and I parted to pack our meager belongings. Learning that we were leaving, the park keeper's wife gave me a loaf of rye bread. By midnight we were on the road.
At sunrise on that crisp Wednesday of October 14, 1944, we, together with a small group of other refugees, were walking between two armies, one retreating, the other advancing. Shells whistled over our heads all day long. When German soldiers crossed a bridge, turned around and frantically waved shouting to hurry up, the bridge will blow up any minute, we ran, crossed the bridge and at a safe distance turned to watch it explode.
We had hardly started walking again when a Soviet plane swooped down on us, machine gun bullets spraying the road, puffs of dust approaching us fast. Everybody jumped into the roadside ditch and no one was hit. The woman getting up next to me cried out in dismay, "My nylons!.. I ripped my nylons!" Stunned by realities clashing, in that ditch my entire past, the life I lived up to this moment, split away solid and rolled into the distance of memories. That day, with every step I took, the future was coming at me, the taste of danger enticing. All day long images of the life left behind kept surfacing. My mind a pin-wheel, bringing up images round and round and sinking them one after the other into the raw pain of partings.
Only three weeks earlier I had borrowed a bicycle to visit my parents some distance from Jurbarkas. In a hurry, on the road I grabbed on to a chain hanging in back of a truck and on a sharp turn was tossed into a ditch. Knees bleeding, I made it to the farmhouse where my parents were staying. As emotional as our meeting was, both parents encouraged me to go abroad, assuring me that knowing foreign languages (German, English, some Russian) would help, that there was no future under the Soviets. In parting, Mother and I cried profusely and Father, teary eyed, for the first time in my memory, held me in his arms, unwilling to let go. I was about to leave when Mother asked, "What attracts you to Vytautas?" "It would be worthwhile to spend a lifetime with him," I answered, surprising myself. That was the last time I saw my parents. And only days ago my brother-in-law came on his bicycle with a message that next Friday a boat would be in the harbor in Klaipeda (Memel) to take our family across the Baltic Sea to Sweden. Every direction was rigged with irreversible changes.
Back in Jurbarkas, the next day I got up at dawn and took the footpath to the river. At this hour the meadow I was to cross was deep in fog. Inside the nebulous substance I was overtaken by a sense of liberation so unexpected, so lofty that I raised my arms. In that gesture something let go of me and fell to the side. And it so happened that that same instant the rising sun pierced the fog and a realization rushed in—no matter which road I was to take, it was OK, it would work out in the end.
That memorable Wednesday, after walking all day our group spent the night in a forest. On Thursday we walked into Tilsit, a historic railway junction where, due to different spans of tracks, trains from imperial Russia stopped and passengers traveling to the west had to change trains. Looking for the railway station we turned a street corner and ran face to face into my sister, her husband pushing their belongings strapped to a bicycle frame, their infant son asleep atop the bundles. We exchanged news, my sister not sure whether our parents would make it to the border in time or stay behind. Since Sweden was no longer an option—the harbor no longer accessible—she suggested that Vytautas and I go on together with them. Preferring to be on our own, I declined.
The train station was packed with people. Herded into a side room we stood there numb like everyone else. When the air-raid sirens started blaring, we were told to leave the station and some of us ran for shelter under a train overpass. The sirens had hardly stopped when bombs started exploding on both sides of our short tunnel. People were screaming, scrambling, calling for each other, looking for their luggage, gathering in small groups outside. When the bombing stopped, we noticed that a blast of air had ripped my unbuttoned coat off of me. We found it wrapped around the base of a tree and moved back to the station. Sitting down on the floor, leaning against the wall, I dozed off.
It was getting dark when Vytautas, standing beside me, bent over and whispered, "The ticket window is opening right above you." I stood up and turned to face the clerk.
"Where to?" she asked. I turned to Vytautas, where to?
"Dresden. We can visit the Zwingli pavilions there."
Late that evening a train pulled up and we boarded. It moved slowly, stopping several times during the night, waiting for army trains to pass. Friday morning it halted in a pine forest in front of a small station. We were told to leave the train and wait on the narrow platform for another. A trainload of people disembarked slowly. Nobody complained, no one asked questions. People just sat on their luggage where it landed, staring at the forest across the rails, avoiding eye contact. Those who had food ate it in silence.
A train did pull in and all night long we were stuck in a corridor, Vytautas standing beside me, I sitting on our valise and napping, my head in his cupped hands. In the valise we had a loaf of bread and a whole salami, a parting gift to Vytautas from his doctor in the sanatorium. Besides the food we had two heavy books, one on the works of the sculptor Maillol, the other on Rodin; a small set of wood-carving tools; an x-ray of Vytautas's lungs; and his plush dark-blue night robe. I had a sweater, some underwear, my diary with a few family photos, a box of watercolors and several pieces of jewelry. Vytautas wore a trench coat over an old pin-striped suit, and I a coat I had designed myself over a sweater, ski slacks and ski boots, and on the head my trademark—a bright red wool kerchief tied in the back, low on the forehead. I was 21, Vytautas 29.
When we rolled into Dresden Saturday morning, the station was packed with restless people milling around. Having hardly slept for three nights, I now fell asleep so hard that I slept when Vytautas walked me from place to place looking for a seat. I slept standing against a wall and, finally seated, I slept with my head resting on a bicycle handle, the owner's head on the saddle. When I awoke, we went looking for the Zwingli pavilions. We found the ceramic museum bombed out, bright colored shards glistening in the rubble. We were walking around the yard when a man, hearing us speak Lithuanian, approached. After a short exchange of questions—" Where from are you... when did you cross the border.... going where to"—he suggested we go to Vienna, where the Lithuanian Refugee Committee issued certificates that registered us as refugees. Without such a paper the German government agencies did not issue food rationing cards. He gave us the address of the Committee and taking his advice we walked back to the station.
To buy a ticket we needed a travel permit but the information desk was closed. Watching a door marked "Station Master" I saw people walk in without knocking. Without a word to Vytautas I walked over and stepped inside. Sitting behind a desk surrounded by four or five army personnel, the Station Master noticed me at the door and asked, "Yes? What do you want?"
"We need a travel permit," I answered in fluent German.
"How did you get here, where from?" he asked.
"By train, from Tilsit."
"Did you have a travel permit?"
"No. We didn't."
"What? And no one checked your papers? No one attended the train all the way up to Dresden? When did you leave Tilsit?"
"Wednesday, at dawn."
The quick exchange of glances among those present froze in mid air. The Station Master motioned the people to leave, bade me to sit down and started questioning.
"Why did you leave Lithuania? (heard the Russians singing). Where are your parents? (I don't know). Where is the front, where are the Soviets, where did you last see units of our army? (We walked behind them to Tilsit, the Soviet army behind us, advancing). And after a pause, "And where do you want to go?"
"First to Vienna to register, then to Innsbruck," I said, wanting to see the Alps my mother used to describe so vividly.
Knowing the German language certainly helped. The Station Master scribbled something on a piece of paper, picked up the phone and ordered a car to take us to the permit issuing office. An officer stepped into the room, took the piece of paper and, after we fetched Vytautas, escorted us to the army car. He took us to the permit office and then back to the station. A few hours later we boarded the train. We reached Vienna late that Saturday night and after spending the rest of the night in the station headed for the Refugee Committee office.
An attendant there told us that this being a Sunday, Lithuanians would be gathering in the church yard around the corner. There we met an acquaintance of mine who invited us to spend the night in her flat. That evening we had an improvised soup, our first warm dish in days. We hardly slept on armchair cushions pushed together on the floor. Monday morning we registered and received a certificate for food stamps. There I met a family friend who informed me that my parents had indeed stayed in Lithuania and that so far no other members of the family had registered in Vienna. We spent the rest of the day walking the streets and early that evening left Vienna for Innsbruck.
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