By Ed Staskus

   Afterwards, Angele Jurgelaityte could never remember exactly where she first met Vladas Jankauskas. “It was in Nuremberg, but I don’t know if I met him at one of the dances at the hospital or at a coffeehouse,” she said. “It might have been at the city zoo.” She went there most days, weather permitting, escorting groups of children from the ward where she worked, children who were recovering from the war, for a walk in fresh air and sunshine. Her youngest niece, Gema, was one of the children. They threw groundnuts to the elephants, even though elephants don’t like nuts and hardly ever eat them.

   Angele’s friend Maryte, her friend from the same Displaced Persons camp in Bavaria they had found themselves in after the end of World War Two, was who told her about starting over in Nuremberg. Angele joined her there in 1947. Whenever they had the chance the two of them jumped on a tram for the two-mile ride downtown, where they slipped into a restaurant or coffeehouse, ordered coffee, and got an earful of music for an hour-or-so.

   “Someone was always playing a piano. We would sit and listen and order another drink if we had to so we could stay and listen some more.”

   Angele was living at the Army Hospital in Nuremberg, studying to be a nurse assistant. She had fled Lithuania in late 1944, when she was 16 years old, on her aunt’s horse-drawn wagon, in a line of carts and wagons miles long. She had been babysitting her aunt’s four children the morning the Red Army appeared on the horizon. Three other Lithuanian women and she shared a small room at the Army Hospital, taking classes and working.

   Vladas was a Lithuanian Army officer who had served with the Vytautas Magnus Guard Unit at the International Military Tribunal war crime trials a couple of years earlier and was still stationed in the city. Many Baltic military officers had been assigned security functions in the Allied zones after the war. They guarded bridges and buildings. Some of them kept an eye on Germany’s war criminals during the series of Nuremberg trials. 

   After the executions of those Nazis judged to have committed crimes against humanity, some of the officers and their units stayed in the city, protecting weapon arsenals, food supplies, and the airport. Vladas wanted to go back to Lithuania, but with Iron Curtain in place it wasn’t looking likely.

   “He was my first boyfriend. He was my friend, but he was a father to me, too,” Angele said. It was summer, three years after the end of the war. She was barely 20 years old and he was 34 years old. He had access to food most Germans and no refugees had access to. He brought her some of it. He brought her oranges and apples. One day he brought a bunch of bananas.

   “I had never had one before. I ate two of them right away.”

   Vladas had been married with a home in Kaunas and a six-year-old daughter. He told Angele his wife was dead. He explained he had been deployed to fight with the Germans when the Russians launched their summer offensive in 1944,  got caught up in the retreat, and couldn’t retrieve his wife and child. They were left behind to fend for themselves. When his wife died soon afterwards his daughter was taken in by his mother.

   “When he told me his wife was dead I didn’t believe him. I told him that, about not believing him, but he didn’t say anything.” Instead of trying to explain he wrote a letter to his mother. She sent him a letter in return. He took it to Angele.

   “He brought it to me unopened. We sat down together on a sofa and he gave it to me. I opened it.” The only thing inside the envelope was a black and white snapshot of the headstone on the grave of his wife. “I was dumbstruck, but no matter, I wasn’t ready to get married. At the same time, I was friends with Vytas.” 

   She hadn’t told Vladas about Vytas, her other boyfriend in the making, a young man her own age. She didn’t tell Vladas that Vytas was in the fast lane. “I told Vladas, sorry, we have to end it. Besides, he had only talked to me about marriage once, while Vytas told me a hundred times we were going to get married.”

   Vytas Staskevicius was from Siauliai. It is both a district and a city in northern Lithuania. The city is the gateway to the Hill of Crosses, a pilgrimage site created in the 19th century as a symbol of resistance to Russian rule. There are more than 100,000 crosses on and around the hill. His father, who had been governor of the province, was arrested in 1940 and died of starvation in a labor camp in Siberia. His mother, a native of Russia, was picked up and deported to Siberia in 1944, where she still was and would remain for another eight years.

   He had seriously hurt his hand in an accident on the family farm during the war, and after fleeing Lithuania in 1944 ended up in Hanau, where he black marketed whatever he could get his hands on and did odd jobs for the American Army. He had gone to the Army Hospital in Nuremberg several times, starting in 1947, where Dr. Rudaitis, a Lithuanian specialist, was performing reconstructive surgery on his hand.

   Angele met Vytas at the hospital. He was unconscious on an operating table the first time she saw him. They met again and started seeing each other after he was back on his feet. “We went for walks and to the movies,” she said. They didn’t hold hands, being careful not to get off on the wrong foot, since his hand was healing.

   “I liked him. He was a steady man, not a fancy man.” When he came back to the hospital in the spring of 1948 they got reacquainted, getting more intimate, growing closer. Intimacy is healing when your home has been broken to pieces and your bones broken, too. They heal better when they have a reason.

   When Vytas went back to Hanau, Angele put her nose to the grindstone. It was all she could do. She had gotten her certification and was saving everything she could for passage to North America, where she was determined to go to build a new life. “I couldn’t go home, I couldn’t stay in Germany, and there wasn’t any future for me in Europe. All of us were trying to go somewhere.”

   She was being paid in the new Deutsche Marks for working at the Army Hospital, unlike many others who were paid partly with money and partly with cigarettes, or only with cigarettes, which were a kind of currency in post-war Germany. Vytas was paid room and board and thirty two packs of Turkish cigarettes a month working his new job at the International Relief Agency in Hanau.

   She was smoking in a hallway one day when Vytas’s bone doctor approached her. “I put my hand behind my back,” she said. There was no hiding the smoke, however. ”Everybody smoked. Dr. Rudaitis gave me a long lecture about not smoking no matter what anybody else did. Finally, he left.” By the time he did the cigarette had smoldered down to a butt and she had to stub it out. It was like burning money. Deutsche Marks cost too much to burn, she thought, and thought about quitting, but didn’t.

   Apart from study and work and more work, writing letters, breakfast, dinner, and sleep, the four Lithuanian roommates, Ele, Koste, Monica, and Angele, talked, played cards, and talked some more in their single room. “We played rummy and talked all the time, about our friends, politics, the future, and the movies.” They all enjoyed the circus, too, but only Angele went to the city’s live theaters. “I loved going to the musical shows. Maryte went with me sometimes.” One day on their way they stopped and got a strip of pictures taken of themselves, their heads close together, in a coin-operated photo booth kiosk.

   “We were in our seats during the show looking at our pictures between songs and laughing when someone behind us complained. An usher came and told us we had to move to the back row and be quiet or we would have to leave.” They sat in the back row quiet as mice the rest of the show, except when they were clapping and crying bravo.

   Their room at the Army Hospital was fitted with four twin beds, a sofa, and a table. The table barely sat the four of them. They played cards among themselves and sometimes with friends, although men rarely played with them, except Vytas. “He would come to our room when he was having another operation on his hand and played cards with us, squeezing himself in. He was the only man who did.”  

   She gave him one of the photographs from the photo booth kiosk. “None of my friends wanted me to be friends with him. Koste and Monica thought he was the wrong man. Ele wanted me to be friends with her brother, but he and I both knew we didn’t like the other one, at all.”

   She was hoping Vytas would be able to get a job at the Army Hospital. One of the maintenance men, a fellow Lithuanian refugee, told them he was moving on and had recommended Vytas. When the time came, however, he changed his mind at the last minute, deciding to stay.

   “After that we weren’t friends anymore,” Angele said. 

   She was vexed her man was not going to be able to be nearby all the time. The more she thought about it the more vexed she became. One evening she saw the maintenance man walking down the long corridor towards their room. She dashed inside, poured a tumbler full of water, opened the door slightly, and positioned the glass on top of the door. She left it ajar. When she heard him passing she called out his name. He pushed the door open, the tumbler fell and his head and shirt were drenched with water.

   “He got so mad!” said Angele.

   “Who did this?” he yelled.

   “The girls were all in the room. They saw what I had done but all of them said they didn’t know who did it.”

   “You did it,” he said, pointing at Angele.

   “I did not do it,” she lied.

   “You are all so childish!”

   It was a childish prank. At least it wasn’t deadly serious. He changed his shirt and toweled off his head. Many bombs had fallen on the heads of everyone in and around Nuremberg during the long war. Better a tumbler of water than being rumbled by blockbuster bombs. Better to be a rumble fish with a chance to swim away.

   During the war Nuremberg was a production center for armaments. It was densely populated, as well, well-suited for the purposes of the area bombing strategy the British had devised. They used a mix of high explosives and incendiary bombs, seeking to create firestorms on the ground. From February 1944 until the end of the war nearly twenty major raids involving more than eight thousand USA Army Air Force and RAF Pathfinder planes bombed the city. B-17’s, B-24’s, and Lancaster’s attacked plants making motorcycles, engines for submarines, and parts for tanks. They destroyed more than a hundred other factories. They destroyed the marshaling yard and the main railway lines. They destroyed industrial and infrastructure targets everywhere, since by that time the Allies exercised air supremacy.

   Nuremberg was mess at the end of the war, blown up, torn apart, families lost and separated, the dead with no one to mourn them. Koste, Monica, and Angele were alone in Germany. Only Ele had family with her, two brothers. By 1948 all were looking for a way out.

   Angele was ready to go in the summer of 1948. She had not been able to get a visa to go to the United States. She was going to Canada, instead. She had a sponsor, since she worked in the children’s ward at the Army Hospital and had the skills to be a nanny. All she had to do was get there. It was a shot in the dark, now or never. It was time to stop marking time.

   After VE Day there were about twelve million refugees, displaced people known as DP’s, in Europe. Half of them were repatriated to their homelands within a few months. Almost four hundred refugee camps were set up in the Allied zones in Germany for the rest. Two years after the end of the war American policy was revised so that every refugee who wanted to emigrate had to have a sponsor. When not enough were found, Congress passed the Displaced Persons Act, providing for more than 200,000 of them to enter the United States. Nearly half of those designated were Ukrainian, who under no circumstances wanted to go home, home meaning almost certain death.

   Many Russian refugees flatly refused to board transports bound for Mother Russia. Some of them killed themselves rather than be repatriated. General Dwight Eisenhower banned the use of forced repatriation in the American zone. The Russians complained. “Should we call the president or just cry about it now?” a staff officer responded.

   By the early 1950s about a million refugees had been absorbed by Western European countries. Approximately half a million were accepted by the United States and a further half million by other nations. Some refugees remained in camps through the decade. It was only near the end of 1960 that the last refugee camp was finally closed.

   Angele was packing when she got a note from Vladas. “Merry Christmas on the first day of the holidays. My squad visited my quarters to wish me a happy holiday, but I wasn’t happy with them or myself. No matter, I wish you the best.”

   She caught a train the morning of November 16, 1948, for the Port of Hamburg, boarded the S. S. Marine Flasher, a repurposed troop carrier, sailed up the Elbe River, the next day crossed the North Sea, and out onto the Atlantic Ocean. It took nine days to cross the ocean. She landed in Halifax, Nova Scotia, boarded a train with the Canada-bound refugees who had been on the ship, disembarking a full day later in Montreal, where she was shuffled around like a second cousin for a week before getting her walking papers, and caught a second train to Sudbury, Ontario, riding the rails for another full day.

   Sudbury was the largest city in northern Ontario and by land area the largest in the province. Its economy was dominated by the mining industry for most of the 20th century. The big mining companies were the major employers in the city and the world’s leading producers of nickel. Outside the city proper the landscape looked like the landscape of the moon. The use of open coke beds well into the mid-20th century and logging for material to burn resulted in the nearly complete loss of trees far and wide. By the 1940s all the pink-gray granite for fifty miles around had long since been turned black by pollution from the roasting yards.

   She was going to be the nanny for the Lapalme’s, one of the leading families in the city, reportedly “the largest family in Sudbury.” Five of the thirteen children were under ten. They were going to be her responsibility. She celebrated Christmas alone that winter, at a desk writing a letter to Vytas.

   “Two of the grown-up Lapalme’s, in their early 20s, are in the next room with their friends, young French couples, dancing, as I write to you. They invited me to join them since one of them had been in a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany and speaks German, but I said thank you, no.”

   She stayed by herself in her room. The song “Chattanooga Choo Choo” bubbled into her room through the gap under the door. The Lapalme’s were dancing to the Glenn Miller Orchestra on a record player. The big-band man’s airplane had disappeared in bad weather over the English Channel four years earlier when he was traveling to France to entertain Allied troops. Only his music was still alive.

   “You don’t understand how lonely it is to be here. I am waiting,” Angele wrote.

   “She’s gonna cry, until I tell her that I’ll never roam, so Chattanooga choo choo, won’t you choo-choo me home?” The needle grooving the record started to skip. A blizzard had engulfed the Sudbury Basin. It was a white Christmas. She got in bed, gathered the quilt around her, and fell asleep shaping the time to come in her mind’s eye.

Photograph: Angele Jurgelaityte and Vladas Jankauskas, Nuremberg, 1947.

Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Ohio Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”