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NENZING by BESHLING
The train stopped in front of a one-room wooden shack. Inside there were only a small window and a bench along a wall. There were no buildings around. No people, no village in sight. Only a steep winding road, more like a footpath in snow, leading up the incline. We took that slippery road and when the terrain leveled out, on that higher plateau against snow-covered mountains lay the village of Nenzing. Another mile or so up another incline and the house we were looking for was the first on the right. I noted beside it a long stone trough filled by water spilling from a wooden spout. Our landlord Herr Stoss greeted us at the door and, after carefully inspecting us and the slip of paper we presented, he took us upstairs.
The room where we were to spend the next seven months was in the upper corner of the house, some twenty feet square. To the left of the door was a white tile heating stove. Next to it stood two elaborate oak beds with a nightstand between them and in it a chamber pot on a shelf. On the wall above the beds hung two large sepia photographs of Herr Stoss's mother and father in black oval frames, the glass bulging as if inflated from inside. Their middle-aged faces, grooved by life-long labor, had stern expressions, their beady eyes cast on whoever entered the room. In the far corner stood a washstand with a pitcher, a bowl and a pail. Near the outer corner of the room a large window faced the orchard. Another large window looked out on the street below. Between the two windows stood a round table and two chairs. Next to the door was a dark impressively carved clothes cupboard under lock. No cooking facilities. The makeshift toilet behind the stair landing was a seat with a hole and under it a square wooden tube running down two stories, hardly bypassing the toilet seat downstairs in full view from our floor. Before leaving, Herr Stoss said that we were to take our meals across the street, at the Stube in the large wooden house behind the old trees. Delighted by the setting we settled in.
The Stube was owned by Herr and Frau Kesler, he the elder of the village, their daughter Irma, 17, serving at the tables, the younger boys seldom in sight. Beside the dining room they also had the only store in the village. I offered Frau Kesler a small golden brooch with a stone for the meals we were to have at their place and delighted she said, this will do for as long as you are here. For breakfast we had fake coffee with sugar and milk and oatmeal; for supper a bowl of soup with bread or a glass of milk with a boiled potato and a slice of cheese and a dab of butter. They served no lunch but gave us provisions for a sandwich to take home.
The sanatorium was on the other side of the tracks. After crossing the railway tracks we took the path across a wide-open meadow, crossed the brook on stepping stones, then walked up the hill to a complex of large multi-storied white buildings with friendly doctors and staff. There, after the pneumothorax, Vytautas would rest on a cot and after that we walked back home. In that meadow we watched spring approaching. First to appear were green shoots in the water, then plump yellow buds at the edge of water, and next to break the ground were wild daffodils. Soon meadow flowers burst into bloom, patches of different colors spreading across the valley in every direction. Spring was here.
A couple from Ukraine and the wife's mother had rented a room in the Keslers' house and now we had company at mealtimes. We shared a large table but were seated at opposite ends and whether we arrived early or late the newcomers were seated already. The ladies were usually dressed up, earrings and beads the norm, their ringed fingers holding the forks daintily. The mother was small and fragile, the daughter good-looking and full-bodied, the husband fat and red in the face and the neck. The couple in their late thirties. They talked in whispers and we more or less took our meals in silence. Once during the meal I dropped the fork and as I bent down to pick it up, under the table I saw that the women were not fully dressed—they did not wear skirts, only slips; no stockings but gray socks sagging around the ankles, instead of shoes shabby slippers.
Once in the middle of the evening meal a great commotion ensued. The mother and daughter looked for something on the table and under their plates, then under the table, the daughter repeatedly examining her mother's lap. I asked, what are you looking for, can I help? They shook their heads and said, nothing important, really. For the next two days for supper we were served heaps of mashed potatoes with gravy, our companions eating great servings somberly, not talking to each other. On the third day they greeted us jubilantly, smiles circling the table as the husband addressed us in German, chatting amicably. Frau Kesler told me later that the other evening the mother had swallowed her false front tooth and had recovered it last evening. A month or so later the mother approached me on the street and learning that I understood Russian, started complaining about the injustice, about the conditions she was forced to suffer. Imagine sleeping with her daughter and that vulgar husband in one room, night after night. How was she to survive such humiliation. Oh the times, oh how things have changed, if you only knew how well off she was before the war. A month later they vanished.
My husband's trousers were falling apart. Seeing the situation, Frau Kesler suggested that we go to a place in town where used clothing was given free to all who came. We made the trip and picked out a large-sized pair of dark pants. Back home I took the new pants apart, seam by seam. Making Vytautas stay in bed, I took his old pants apart as well, then borrowing an iron from Frau Kesler I pressed the pieces from both pants. Using the old pants for a pattern I put them on the new pieces and cut them out. It took me three full days to sew the new pants by hand. Vytautas got out of bed to try them on. The new ones looked just as bad as the old ones. By following the old pattern diligently, I had cut the legs not straight but curved, the knees pre-stretched already.
The soles on Vytautas's shoes were also gaping and since I got myself a new pair, Vytautas split the top leather of my ski boots in half and I stitched one edge of the patches to his uppers, the other edge over the gaping sole, the patches intended to make the shoes look stylish. It helped a lot when out of a stick of wood and a sharpened nail pulled out of the wall Vytautas fashioned a tool for making holes in leather.
An old trunk by the toilet door was stuffed with old clothing, including two dusty man's hats, one brown and the other black. Fingers itchy, I made two fancy flapper-style hats for myself, one worn deep over one eye, the other a cloche. Wearing them only at home, I amused Vytautas by talking and walking like Greta Garbo.
Every day at sunrise and at sunset the farmers brought their cows to the trough to drink. With our windows open, we heard the news of the day, our only source of information. War was on everybody's minds and day by day the news worsened. The German army was beaten there, gaining some ground here, the whole front retreating gradually. Son of so and so was recruited, parents of the youngster alarmed. His friend was already in the mountains to escape this last wave of recruitment. And if that were not enough, the other day even the grandfather of so and so received a letter urging him to set an example, join the army and save his Fatherland. And soon the meadows will be ready in the uplands and then the cattle must be driven to the mountains for the summer ,and who is to milk the cows up there and make the cheese?
In the fifth month of pregnancy my ski pants were getting tight. It was time to go to Bludenz and locate the hospital. They put my name and address in the book under the date the child was expected and gave me the name and address of the attending midwife. A few days later there was a knock at our door—a youngster delivering a box with an unsigned note inside: "I was expecting but lost the child. I will never have children, my husband fell in the war." In the box was a stylish dark green maternity dress and a slip.
With the pear tree at our window in bloom, the hum of bees and sounds of running water filled the room. A bee lost in the room would circle our heads then land on a branch heavy with blossoms resting on our window sill like an arm. In the slightest breeze petals drifted into our room and into my soul. Afternoons we took long walks exploring the neighborhood, every fruit tree a cloud of white or in shades of pink. Walking the highway up the mountain on the far side of the train tracks, our village looked like a cloud nestled between two mountain ridges. Every patch of color, every angle of a shadow, the air itself, was part of me with child, the breath of nature laden with promises at once so far and so near.
One afternoon I was walking home from town by myself, climbing the slope to our village, when a sensation so strong, so unexpected made me stop. Every blade of grass underfoot was gazing at me. The bird riding a thermal watched over me. The breeze came around to cool me. God's finger seemed to touch my shoulder. What was going on?
At age fourteen I had denounced the church. By then I was already wondering how come that Man, created in the image of God, was not good enough for human kind? How come the church was so eager to perfect human nature? In school, part of the meager religious instruction, it was mandatory we go to confession at least once a year. That year, beside the regular list of broken don'ts, I had "a real sin" to report. And thought I had no pangs of guilt, I told it to the priest. He asked why I did it and I blamed my friends, which was a lie. For penance I was told to say the necessary prayers and, intending to do that, I walked over to the statue of the Holy Mother and knelt down.
I remember the blinding glare of an explosion in my head. Short-circuited, I ran out of the church and ran blindly until I stopped in a part of town I'd never seen before. Shocked that that I lied during confession, I walked back to the church. The priest was still in his booth. I approached him and said, I am the one who told you this and that and the Ôwhy' was a lie. After a silence he said, you are a good Catholic. That did it. My coming back had nothing to do with being a Catholic. My best friends, one Jewish and the other Lutheran, would have done the same. I returned because the fact that I lied during confession was an indication that I had no reverence, no respect for what was the House of God to others. I was an outsider.
And now, this blessed afternoon in the Alps, inhaling God's breath at every step, I was holding hands with God as with an intimate friend. I had reduced a presence of a much higher order to my own human scale. Now it was clear why, for me, the church was not the House of God—nature was. It was enough to sense a presence much greater than my own. It was enough to have IT breathe in my face. No need for stained- glass windows between us. It was all right not to grasp ITS overwhelming immensity. It was all right that IT had no name. Leaving the church for the second time, I walked home deeply humbled.
The child in me was already stirring. A village woman stopped me to say that when the pains come, I would be on my knees cursing my husband. Another warned me that it took her two days to deliver her first child, adding, you will see what it does to you. I was sure that all would go well because my mother had told me that the body knows how to give birth, and it knows how to heal itself and, when it comes to that, it knows how to die.
Those were the days for dreaming, for building our futures and our fortunes. We were to have separate studios, each of our own design. We were sketching our studios, Vytautas's ideal a barn-like space in the country, a footpath across a meadow from home, a cat, tail erect, leading him to work every morning. All I could think of was a space high above the bustling world. We also visualized the work each would do in there. Vytautas would be building grand monuments while I, having little to build on, just saw something growing in my studio space as if it were my belly. Somewhere in between we told our life stories, getting better acquainted by delving into experiences unfamiliar to the other. Eventually we reached the point where the question came up: how would we support our dreams? Our dreams wilting by the hour, it did not take long for us to entertain the idea of getting ourselves arrested, of working in jail to our heart's content, a roof overhead and meals guaranteed. But what crime could secure such unhampered existence? We had great fun considering the types of crime we thought ourselves able to commit. The ventures morphed from escapades to adventure, from adventure to film with heroic roles for us, Vytautas usually a tragic figure, I a misfit. Eventually Vytautas settled in the Middle Ages, joining the cathedral builders, and I in Africa, the roar of lions at night a call to the jungle. The realization that we were no longer together raised a discomforting question: what was more important, the work or the family? Such considerations were so far out of place at the time that my internal compass needle did not budge one way or the other.
In mid-May loud voices outside our windows made us jump out of bed—the war had ended. The jubilation was loud but short for in the next breath people were thinking about their loved ones coming home. And soon enough you would see two or three tired men on the road approaching the village slowly. Sometimes they were Italians walking home and looking for food, never denied to them. And sometimes a scream of recognition pulled everyone into the street, cheers exploding, groups hugging, teary voices shouting, questions flying: have you seen Peter, have you heard of Hans? Even the bark of dogs sounded jubilant in chorus. Then the sudden silence, when the loved one crossed the threshold and entered home, when the door closed, when after all those treacherous years members of the family looked at each other.
One morning Vytautas saw across the street two French soldiers posted in front of the steps to the Kesler house. The allies had divided Germany into sectors and Forarlberg fell to the French. The Kesler house became a French officer outpost, and so the Stube was closed to us.
Frau Kessler gave me back the leftover food stamps saying that the French had taken over the kitchen and she could no longer take care of us. In addition she gave me a bag of farina and a thick slice of cheese and said we could pick up a liter of milk every morning. Where was I to cook? The housekeeper who took care of Herr Stoss would have none of it. We put two bricks in the opening of the stove used for heating, filled a tin can with milk, stirred in the farina, set the can on the bricks and feeding the fire stick by stick tried to boil the milk. We seldom succeeded, as either the milk would boil over or the farina settle on the bottom and burn. Anyway, the farina did not last long. Since the French did not issue rationing cards, for a week or so warmed milk was our only meal of the day.
What made things worse was that the doctor we befriended left the sanatorium for another position and was replaced by one straight out of school. Twice he pumped too much air into Vytautas's lungs. He started running a low fever and when in the mornings he bent over the bowl to wash, I could hear water gurgling in his lung cavity. We skipped a few appointments and his condition improved. Then I located a neighbor who sold me bread and cheese regularly, and together with the daily liter of milk from Frau Kessler, we had nourishment enough.
One afternoon we came home from a walk and found a note attached to the front door: "This is to inform Vytautas Kasuba that tomorrow at noon a truck will arrive and take him and his wife to a center where from they will be repatriated back to his home land, the Soviet Union. Please prepare for the trip." Well. We had been on the brink of calamities before but this was outrageous. We turned around and marched down the road to Beschling where the district's officials held office. A placard over a door said "The Office of the French Army" and we walked in. In the smoke-filled room three fold-up tables faced the door, three officers sitting behind them. I asked, does any one speak English? The man in the middle nodded. I approached him, lifted my belly onto the table and said, "This child will be born here. Will it be German or Lithuanian, as we are?"
"Not German," the officer said and the one on his left nodded in confirmation.
"The same happened to my husband. During the first world war his family was displaced to Minsk, and he was born there. Is he Russian?"
"No," everyone agreed.
"Then take us off the list," I said, placing before him the note we found on our door.
All three looked at it and after a short consultation the one I spoke to said, "We will take care of this." And they did, for no truck came to pick us up.
The French took over Herr Stoss's ground-floor room, next to the animal stables under the same roof. There they showed films of Charlie Chaplin, and Vytautas and I took turns to see them. They had only four or five short reels and showed them night after night after night. To maintain interest, the soldiers would read the dubbed English dialogues in chorus adding relish. Then they learned to laugh in unison, booing those who laughed too early and those who fell behind, their bellows rattling the windows. When they started running the films in reverse from start to finish, the films' content changed drastically—the chain of events that built up to an explosion of laughter before, in reverse unwound the high point to a disappointing ending. When that too became boring, our local theater closed.
Jonas, the Lithuanian we met in the station of Bludenz, paid us a visit. The Refugee Organization was now in touch with the Red Cross and he brought a package for us. In it were a can of Spam, two bars of chocolate, a block of pressed marmalade, two packs of cigarettes, and a bag of pink flour with raisins and chopped nuts mixed in it. Jonas stayed for several hours and we talked about many things, including our wish to go to America. He promised to visit us often and kept his word.
After he left I set out to bake the pink stuff in our "oven." I added water to the mixture, kneaded the dough and let it stand, expecting it to rise as a bread should. It did not. In the meantime Vytautas was heating the oven and, running out of patience, I placed the dough on a metal can lid and put it on the bricks to bake. The blob looked the same after an hour. Two hours later I removed the loaf and Vytautas was ready to cut it. The loaf squeaked under the knife. After several more squeaks he picked it up, examined it closely and pronounced, "This is ancient bread. After centuries in an Egyptian pyramid it has dried to rock." We kept that Egyptian bread for some time, for me a symbol of how much I had to learn. Actually I never learned to bake.
Jonas suggested that we come to Bludenz and meet the Lithuanians who lived there, maybe rent an apartment and stay there. We made the trip, expecting to meet Jonas in the church yard not far from the station. Entering Bludenz the train slowed down, and standing in the doorway I saw the church steeple approaching and jumped off the still-moving train. Vytautas jumped after me, and we both landed on our feet. For the first time he was seriously cross with me. How could I, so close to the end of pregnancy, be so irresponsible.
We met Jonas, a couple he brought with him and the man who was to show us an apartment. It was on the second floor, windows facing a large yard, children playing in the dirt. The place was freshly painted, had two bedrooms, a kitchen and a bathroom. No one found anything wrong with it. It so happened that I was left behind and locked in the apartment. I opened the window and told the group standing below what happened. Learning that the man with the key was gone, I leaned out and reached down. Vytautas could touch my fingers and it was decided that I should push myself over the sill and fall into the arms of the three men ready to catch me. The window frame pressing painfully into my belly I did just that and the men caught me, all four of us falling to the ground and laughing so hard we could hardly stand up. How reckless we were at the time.
Around that time Kesler's daughter Irma paid us a visit. She was pregnant, could we help, her parents would kill her if they knew and so on as these stories go. Could we give her a hot bath? That we could, all it took was to heat the water in Herr Stoss's laundry room on the first floor of the house. Next day on the hour appointed I put a towel on the window sill signaling that we were ready, and went to the washroom to wait for Irma. Vytautas was already there tending to the fire. When she appeared the water in the cauldron was steaming hot and while she undressed, we filled a wooden tub with it. The poor girl stepped into it whimpering no, it is not too hot, I can stand it, let me sit in it a bit longer. Irma was lobster red when we decided it was enough. Next day Irma came over to tell us that it did not help and tearfully spilled out her plight. The father of the child was the French chef who cooked for the officers in their kitchen where she helped him. She was not seduced in the woods behind the kitchen, not really. Because she liked him. She liked him a lot. He knew that she was pregnant before he was dispatched home from the army. Promised to write. I held her hand, I stroked it, gave her a handkerchief, urged her to tell her parents before she started to fill out.
In early fall I looked out the window one afternoon and there was Irma, visibly pregnant, standing, intently looking down the road. A man was coming up the hill slowly. In a burst of screams she started running and by the time her parents were out the door, she was in the arms of her soldier. He had come back for her all the way from Algiers. I never saw such jubilation, so triumphant, so proud, so fulfilling all around.
A calf and a pig were slaughtered for the wedding, the aroma of cakes fresh out of the oven drifting our way for a couple of days as beer brewed in casks. It seemed that the whole village came to the wedding, and we were invited too. Irma was wearing a white satin dress, a white veil, white blossoms in her hair, in bloom herself. Shortly thereafter the newlyweds departed to Algiers, her husband a proprietor of a family confectionary there, she ready to have 12 children to help them run the enterprise. During the wedding I heard that in our village six other maidens were pregnant.
My delivery date marked on the calendar was in July, only days away. The day came and it passed. And so did another day. It did not occur to me to ask Frau Kesler what was going on, so on the third day we took the afternoon train to Bludenz to see the midwife. She pressed my belly on one side, then on the other, then lifted it some and holding the belly in her palms, said, "You are ready. IT is waiting for the full moon."
That evening, walking home up the hill from the station, there it was—a huge soft orange moon looking at me. We stopped. A faint shiver settled in the small of my spine. And at dawn next morning the first pain hit me. On the second hit I awakened Vytautas and told him what was happening. He jumped out of bed, started dressing, urged me to hurry, we must catch the 7 AM train. And I said, no, it is too early, we will take the 4 PM train. I don't have a single recollection of how we spent the hours before leaving for the train.
Walking down the hill did me good, it rounded out the pain. It was no longer stabbing. Instead, a distant rumbling like waves of an aftershock invaded the body. I could not sit down in the shack by the tracks but kept pacing the floor. I could not sit or stand upright in the train but stood bent over in the corridor with my head out the window, people bumping into me in passing. I got out of the train all right but just stood there looking at the hill I had to climb to the hospital.
Vytautas looked at me as if asking, can you make it? I started moving. My legs had spread and wobbling like a duck I bent over with laughter. Vytautas caught on and now both laughing, hilarious we made it up the hill. Someone standing at the entrance to the hospital saw us coming, rushed inside and came back with a nurse to help us. On the stairs I turned to Vytautas and said, come back in an hour, we will be ready.
Inside the hospital the two women rushed off to prepare the delivery room. Left alone, I kept walking the length of the corridor back and forth in a steady gait, the humming inside the body hypnotic. Someone in passing asked, what time is it? And as I stopped to look at my wrist watch, the pain hit me with a wrenching stab. For support I leaned into the wall. To compose myself I started walking again and to my surprise the minute my gait fell into rhythm, the pain subsided. In the delivery room, as soon as I lay down the midwife threw my legs up and said push. And did I push, sensing the body give and give again, give some more every time and on the last push the child slipped into this world, was here among us, her first cry in my ears to this day. She looked just like her father without his dark-rimmed glasses.
I watched the midwife cut the cord and tie it. She then washed my daughter and swaddled her in a white cloth. Then she washed me, changed the sheets, and after putting our daughter into my arms, straightened the covers. We expected Vytautas to knock on the door any minute. We waited and waited another hour but he did not come. Is there a husband, asked the midwife.
Early next morning Vytautas walked in with a small bouquet of meadow flowers in his hand. A note was stuck in it, I love you, it said. Holding my hand, eyes glued to our daughter sleeping in a crib beside me, he told me what had happened last night. When the hospital attendants took me away, he went down the hill but turned off the street where the hill drops off to the grassy ridge overlooking the station below. The minute he sat down, the long-forgotten hymns his parents used to sing when he was a child came to memory one after another.
At this point Vytautas stopped talking and looked at me. How was it? he asked. Fast, I said, elated. In less than an hour after you left. Was it bad? He looked aside. I felt everything, there was no time for pain.
He had no idea how long he sat on that ridge transfixed by his parents chanting. Seeing a train roll into the station, he jumped to his feet, ran down and boarded the train already in motion. That's when he remembered the hospital. Learning that he was on a train that rolled in the opposite direction, he got off in the next station were he had to wait several hours for the train that rolled in the right direction, and got home only at midnight. Having been myself in such a transfixed state more than once, I had no difficulty understanding his predicament.
I asked Vytautas to hand me our daughter. Touched, she woke up, tiny hands flailing in the air when he held her in his arms. Face awash with emotion he placed her beside me. I attempted to nurse our daughter but she was fast asleep. Blissfully shy we finally looked at each other.
We were out of money, and our next worry was how to pay for the hospital. We remembered the gold Russian coin my sister had given Vytautas in parting, but how and where to sell it? Homebound that evening he was pacing the train platform when a man approached him and asked whether he had a gold coin to sell. Vytautas took the coin out of his inner pocket and took the money offered. One other unexplainable coincidence that happened to many during the war.
On the second day Jonas came to visit me and finding Vytautas already at my side, took him to register our daughter and get a birth certificate. On the third day I was to go home and Vytautas came to fetch us. The nurse asked him for the diapers and baby clothing he was expected to bring. We had none. She took me and the baby to a side room, ripped up several pillowcases, wrapped the baby in a sheet and handed her to me. The hospital refused to take payment and provided an ambulance to drive us all the way home.
I had traded the chocolate we found in the Red Cross package for an old baby carriage with small wheels. A folded blanket substituted for a mattress, the sheet from the hospital a cover. Some months earlier someone had given me a piece of apple-green fabric and I made a baby shirt of it. I embroidered it with white sewing thread, a white lacelike knit around the edges to soften the green. It was so small our newborn hardly fit into it. Nevertheless, in it she spent her first night with us. We named her Guoda, an old Lithuanian name, Guodele a diminutive.
A few days later we found a large white box at our door. In it were a complete layette and plenty of diapers. The note said, "Please do not try to find me or thank me." It probably was from the woman who let me have her maternity dress. On our first outing men and women flocked to the carriage to look at the baby who lay so deep they had to take a step closer to see her on the bottom of the carriage. That day I also dumbfounded Vytautas by pulling the carriage instead of pushing it in front of me.
One evening the neighbor who lived in the back of Herr Stoss's house stopped me to ask why the baby was crying so hard every evening around 7:00 pm. That's when I bathe her, I answered. How do you bathe her? Seated in our washbasin, in water heated in a can in the oven. She offered me her baby's bathtub and suggested that I come for it at sunset, when she was done with it. So every evening I would knock on her door, she would hand me the small wooden tub, I'd rinse it under the spout in the trough, then bathe my daughter, rinse it again and return the tub. True enough, Guodele no longer cried but enjoyed her evening baths. After a month or so I knocked on the door and heard the woman say, come in. The room I stepped into appeared to be gray all over, including the faces of the three small children staring at me. The baby was sitting in the tub placed on the table. Out of its ear oozed a thick bloody puss. Seeing me look at it the mother washed off the puss and finished bathing the baby. She then opened the window, poured the bath water out the window and handed the wooden tub to me. I returned it unused, thanked the woman and told her that we were getting a tub of our own. Instead of risking infection I reverted to using the washbasin.
When I changed Guodele's diapers, I was mesmerized by her reflexive responses to the touch of my hands. Her eyes looked like pools of dark mysteries filled with knowledge long forgotten. Her gaze held centuries of human footprints, of generations coming into this world and leaving it like a passing cloud, like a leaf falling off a tree. How temporary, how fragile were our lives, how demanding was survival. There was no way to prepare our offspring to face indifferent, unpredictable, omnipotent forces. Art, the dreams, the striving, were so far away in those days that I hardly cared. Who needs art when every day harbors such mysteries? If the call for art in me was real, it would surface again. Why worry about it now?
Jonas, our friend from Bludenz, visited us more often now, bringing Red Cross packages and news. He suggested that Vytautas write to his sister in America, wife of the consul general of Lithuania in New York City, in office from the pre-war times, telling them that we wanted to go to America and asking what we should do to speed up the process of getting there. By the end of October we receive a letter from Vytautas's brother-in-law. He suggested that we move to the American zone, preferably to Munich, and promised to find a sponsor to sign the necessary affidavit. Soon thereafter Jonas contacted the Refugee Committee in Munich and learned that two of Vytautas' brothers were already living in the Displaced Persons Camp Lohengrin, run by a United Nations Relief Agency (UNRA). Juozas, the older brother, was the commander of the Lithuanian wing. We decided to leave Nenzing without delay and sent a card to that effect to New York and also to Juozas.
Right after the war ended, UNRA established camps for refugees throughout Germany, and most refugees flocked to them for the security of daily bread and a roof over the head. Vytautas and I stayed out of camps because neither of us wished to trade our freedom of movement for the security a camp offered.
The trip by train was to take overnight. The old valise was too small, so Vytautas dismantled the baby carriage and made a wooden box to fit on the wheels. I got hold of some heavy fabric and fashioned a pouch for the baby, a padded cardboard inserted in the back for support. Nursing was not going too well and I was already using a bottle to supplement it, and the trip became the occasion to switch to bottle feeding altogether. I made a contraption to warm the milk on the train: a wire stand to support a can with water over a lab burner (traded for a box of cigarettes), the heated water to heat the milk in the bottle placed in it. It did not work as well as expected but we made it to Munich.
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