By Ed Staskus

   The new-style lightning war that started in 1939 won the Third Reich most of Europe and substantial parts of Russia. Five years later the Red Army was poised to take revenge on its enemy. When the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front tried to weather the storm and fight out of encirclements, the Russians did what the Germans would have done, fed armor into the attack, maintaining mobility, forcing the issue deep into rear areas, faster than the enemy could respond. Their M4A2 Sherman tanks, built by the United States, could be replaced when destroyed faster than German factories could take a breath and say, “Gute trauer!”

   “The Russians came very quickly,” said Angele Jurgelaityte. “We listened to the radio every day. We could hear booming in the distance, which was their bombs and cannons. The Germans were all over the roads. The Russians were to the north and the east of us. Everybody knew they were coming.”

   The angel-face of her aunt’s family, the family Angele was staying with near Alvitas, Lithuania, didn’t know, but everybody else in the Baltics knew the Red Army was coming back and there was going to be hell to pay. “Everybody was worried and unhappy.” Most Lithuanians sided with the Germans. There were centuries of bitterness smoldering between Vilnius and the Muscovites.

   It was in the summer of 1944 that Soviet forces went on the offensive. The Germans were pushed back on a shifting front. Armored tank columns from both sides advanced on Vilkaviskis, four miles away from where Angele was. If it wasn’t for land mines she could have walked there in an hour. The Russian 33rd Army entered the town a few days later and then secured the rail depot at Marijampole. The Third Panzer Army mounted a counterattack, but after several grim tank battles was finally forced to retreat to Kybartai, rolling back to a last-ditch defensive line defending the Baltics. Neither the Germans nor the Russians listened to a single Lithuanian who said the land wasn’t their land to begin with.

   “It was one day in the afternoon that a lady, a teacher, who was one of my aunt’s friends, with two kids, a small boy and a small girl, came to our farm from Vilnius,” Angele said. The woman and Angele’s aunt, Ona Kreivenas, had studied and graduated together from a teacher’s college. She was in a horse drawn wagon with her children and what chattels and valuables she could pack and carry. She had come from the big city in a rush. She told them there was Russian armor hiding on the nearby farm tracks.

   The next morning Ona, Angele, and the children, Mindaugas, Carmen, Ramute, and the toddler Gema, loaded their wagon with clothes, blankets, and food. They hitched two horses to the wagon and tied a cow to the back. “We took milk with us when we left, for baby Gema, and hoped we would find more when we were gone.” They took whatever they could shoulder. They left their buggy and let the riding horse, the rest of the cows, and all the pigs and chickens loose. Ona’s friend followed behind them.

   “We let all the animals go. What could we do? The Russians would have just stolen all of them.”

   Ona took all her money and what jewelry she possessed with her in a handbag that she could keep close to the vest. She filled a trunk with her sewing machine, china, vases, artifacts, and family heirlooms. They lugged it behind the barn, where the remains of months of potatoes thrown down to feed the pigs were piled up.

   They cleared a space, dug a four-foot deep hole, and buried the trunk. They threw potato scraps back over the overturned ground. When they were done, they left in two wagons, two women, seven children, and a cow on the move, suddenly homeless in their own home.

   “We moved back about fifteen miles.”

   They went southwest towards East Prussia. “We stopped at a big farm. When we got there, there were already hundreds of people in the fields, with their wagons, and their families. The farmer there slaughtered and cut pigs up for us. All the women made food. Everybody was talking about the war, about what to do.”

   There was heavy fighting between German and Soviet troops in the Baltics. As the fighting raged, more than 130,000 Latvians escaped to Sweden and Germany. In total, the country lost almost 20% of its population during the war, either dead or gone. The Great Escape in Estonia started in the summer and continued through the fall. It is estimated 80,000 Estonians fled from the Red Army to anywhere else. Almost a 100,000 Lithuanians joined them, clogging the roads to Poland, Prussia, and Germany.

   Ona crept back to her farm during the week the Panzer divisions were holding their own. The countryside was nearly deserted. She discovered the trunk they had buried underneath the pile of potato scraps behind the barn had been dug up and was gone. “There was just a big hole. The Russians took it. They used metal sticks to poke into the ground. Her sewing machine was gone, all gone, everything gone.”

   They slept rough, out of doors, like everybody else. “We slept on blankets on the ground. When it rained, we slept under the wagon and stretched a tarp out to keep the water away.” Every day it got darker. Over the course of September, the length of the day in Lithuania rapidly decreases. By the end of the month the daylight is two hours less than it was at the start of the month.

   Their encampment stretched out for six weeks. They dug latrines and filled barrels with water. They picked apples off trees and blueberries from bushes. They took especial care of their horses. They greased the axles of their wagons, making sure the grease bucket was always full of animal fat and tar, and making sure they had a spare axle. Without one a broken axle would be a disaster, bringing them to a standstill.

   The children played games whenever they had idle time. “We played the ring game,” Angele said. “We all sat in a circle and passed around a pretend ring, like a twig or a pebble. Sometimes we passed it, but other times we didn’t. We just pretended to give it to who was next to us. One of us was it, like in tag, who had to guess who had the ring. If they were right, they got a prize, like a pencil. If they were wrong, they had to sing a song or do a dance in the middle of the circle.”

   When they finally left, they left in the early evening. They had heard over the radio that morning that the Russians had come closer. They spent the day packing and preparing. It was now or never. “Most of us left, although some stayed. Some of the farmers wanted their land back. They didn’t want to leave.” It was all they had. It was all they had ever known. They were loath to give it up. “My aunt had to go, no matter what. The farm didn’t matter. Her husband had already been taken by the Communists. She knew they would take her, too, if they caught her, send her away to Siberia, and her children would be left behind, orphans.”

   It rained that day and the rest of the night. “The road was crowded on both sides. There were thousands of wagons, wagon after wagon, all going one way. There wasn’t a single car or truck, just horses. We knew the Germans were somewhere ahead of us and the Russians somewhere behind us, but we didn’t see any soldiers anywhere, at all.”

   Ona was at the reins of the two-horse team, her seven-year-old daughter Ramute beside her holding the three-year-old Gema, and Carmen, Mindaugas, and Angele walking. Most of the refugees were walking, their wagons jam-packed with possessions and provisions. Their friend from Vilnius with her two small children stayed in line behind them.

   Before the war, Lithuania’s population was almost 3 million. After the war it was closer to 2 million. Some Lithuanians ended up dead. Many were deported. Others ran for their lives. The displaced were forced to make new lives in different countries all around the world, whatever country they could get to, whatever country would take them, whatever country they could sneak into.

   When the second Soviet invasion of the 1940s happened, some Lithuanians tried to flee across the Baltic Sea to the Nordic countries, but only a few were successful. Patrol boats apprehended them, and they ended up hauled off to labor camps. Most fled west, while others went south to Hungary, Romania, and the Balkans.

   “On the way we met my uncle on the road, Uncle Jankauskas and his family.” Her uncle’s wagon fell into line with them. The progression of wagons stretched as far as the eye could see, ahead and behind. They soon crossed into East Prussia. There were no guards. They had all fled. The borderland was a mess.

   “I was so sad leaving Lithuania,” Angele said.

   Russian warplanes strafed and bombed the column of evacuees several times. The Red Air Force was bombing and strafing at will, both German Army and refugee columns alike. Forest and brush on both sides of the road were set on fire. There was smoke in the sky day and night. Wagons and carts slowly wended their way around rain-filled craters.

   “It was all just wagons. They knew we were refugees They dropped bombs and shot their machine guns. I don’t know why they did that. Whenever we heard airplanes, we all ran and jumped into ditches beside the road. I was afraid, but somehow I knew I wouldn’t be hurt by them.”

   What was called the Baltic Gap had grown so menacing to the Reich that Adolf Hitler moved his headquarters from Berchtesgaden to Rastenburg in East Prussia. The German situation on the Eastern Front was desperate. The fighting was hard and bitter. It was a fight to the finish. The hinterland was torn up, abandoned and forlorn.

   “Most of the people on farms had run away. We would go into their houses and find dried fruit, pickles, mushrooms, pork, and wine.” They ransacked barns, pantries, and root cellars. “We took all the food we could find, all of it. It rained most of the time, it was cold, and we walked and walked. Everybody was hungry.”

   The rain and asphalt track were hurtful to their cow. The animal was careful as could be on the poor traction of the wet road, stepping timidly with its rear feet spread wide. It was compensating by walking with an arched back. They finally had to do something. They knew the long miles and pavement weren’t good for it. They thought she might be going lame. Angele’s uncle looked at the cow’s hooves and saw lesions. An ulcer was forming on one hoof.

   “Mindaugas and I found a family that hadn’t run away. We went to their farmhouse and sold the cow to them.” They gave the money to Ona and she hid it on her person with the rest of her money. She had plans for it.

   One cold night when they stopped to rest her uncle said, “Kids, jump up and down to warm yourselves up.” When Angele stopped jumping, he grasped her under the armpits. “He grabbed me. We were jumping up and down and he dropped me by accident.” She broke her wrist. “It hurt bad, but there were no doctors to help me.” When they got to a town with a railroad station, there weren’t any doctors there, either. The smart and the skilled had already left. Everybody else was hoping against hope. Angele’s wrist had to take care of itself.

   After the New Year the German population of East Prussia, most of whom had not yet cut and run, began to evacuate as the Red Army rapidly advanced. Within weeks it turned into helter-skelter flight as more than two million of the two-and-half million men women children of the enclave bolted into the Polish Corridor heading for Germany. The winter weather was bad, the roads were caving in, and the civil authorities were overwhelmed. There was panic and quagmire and many thousands died, some caught in combat, others swept away in the chaos.

   But before that happened, Ona Kreivenas had already sold their wagon and horses and everything they couldn’t carry and managed against the odds to get passage on a train going to Berlin. The Prussian Eastern Railway connected Danzig and Konigsberg to Berlin. A month later, the last week of January 1945, the last train to Berlin ran the rails. There was no traffic on the line after that.

   “The train was completely full. The corridors were full, too.” They stood in a tight group in the corridor. The passenger cars were red and had ten large windows on both sides. They were pressed against one of the windows. Some of the windows were smashed and the passageway was as cold as the outside. “We had a pillow for Gema, who slept on the floor, but we stood that night and the next day.”

   The twin locomotives pulling the long line of passenger cars and baggage cars and a caboose were in camouflage livery. On their front was painted the Hoheitsadler, an eagle, Germany’s traditional symbol of national sovereignty, holding a swastika in its talons. By the time they crossed Poland and entered Germany, the talons and swastika were obscured by coal soot.

   Lehrter Bahnhof was the Berlin terminus, adjacent to Hamburger Bahnhof, built in the late 19^th century just outside of what was then Berlin’s boundary on the Spree River.  It was built in the French neo-Renaissance style, the façade covered in glazed tiles. The station had long been known as a “palace among stations.” But it had been severely damaged by Allied strategic bombing and was near to being a shambles.

   When they finally got off the train in Berlin, tired and stiff from standing, they were met on the platform by Bishop Brizgys. The clergyman was Ona’s husband’s cousin. Vincentas Brizgys had been the assistant to Juozapas Skvireckas, the archbishop of Kaunas. During the summer of 1944 he and the archbishop and more than two hundred other Lithuanian priests fled the country with several retreating German army divisions. Ona had somehow located him by telephone, and he arranged to meet them at the train station. He was wearing a dark suit and a homburg and carrying a basket of hot buns.

   “He gave one to each of us. I was so happy,” Angele said.

   She was 16-years old, somewhere between childhood and adulthood. Seven years later, and a  continent away, she gave birth to me, followed quickly by my brother and sister. In the meantime, hope for the future was the only thing keeping her on her feet.

   The Third Reich’s war economy was on the verge of collapse. The whole country was a sinking ship. There was a shortage of bread sausage cabbage beer, and everything else. When they looked around, the buns the bishop had brought were the only cheer they could see. There wasn’t going to be any traditional roast goose this holiday season.

   Angele looked at the four children and her aunt. She glanced up and down the platform. Their friend from Vilnius and her uncle were long gone, lost in the fog of war. Bishop Brizgys led them out of the station into the city. The Red Army numbering over four million men was massing on the Vistula River and along the East Prussian border. Their superiority was ten to one in infantry and twenty to one in artillery and planes. Berlin and its three million residents were already a wreck, the day and night Allied bombing taking a monstrous toll.

   The early afternoon was a gray haze. There was smoke in the sky. It was darkness at noon. She looked at the rubble in the street. When she looked ahead, she knew in her teenaged bones it was going to be a grown-up bare-bones winter on German soil.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street at http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Down East http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

“A Cold War thriller that captures the vibe of mid-century NYC.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CRPSFPKP

The end of summer, New York City, 1956. Stickball in the streets and the Mob on the make. President Eisenhower on his way to Ebbets Field for the opening game of the World Series. A killer waits in the wings. A Hell’s Kitchen private eye scares up the shadows.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

By Ed Staskus

   “The holy bishop from Kaunas fixed it up for us,” Angele Jurgelaitis said when she arrived in Berlin in the middle of the night. There was nothing holy about the ferocious last days of World War Two. It was a godless maelstrom. It helped to have a man of the cloth on your side when the devil was doing his best on the other side. There was more than enough hellfire on earth that winter.

   When Angele, 16 years old, Ona Kreivenas, who was her aunt, and Ona’s four children got off one of the last trains that the Prussian Eastern Railway ran from East Prussia to Germany they were met at the station by Bishop Vincentas Brizgys. The clergyman was Ona’s husband’s cousin. Her husband, a Chief of Police in southern Lithuania, had been arrested by the Russians in 1941 and deported to Siberia, where he was stuck in a slave labor camp. By the early fall of 1944 Bishop Brizgys and more than two hundred other priests had already fled the Baltics on the heels of retreating German forces.

   Many Lithuanians barreled out of the Baltics in the fall and winter of 1944 as the Red Army overwhelmed the Wehrmacht and overran the land. The fighting was tenacious and terrible. Wartime losses of Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians were among the highest in Europe. They didn’t go down without protest. They were out-gunned, though.

   Ona had somehow located the bishop by telephone from East Prussia and he arranged to meet them at the train station. He was wearing a dark suit and a homburg. He was carrying a basket of hot buns. He looked like the churchman he was. Berlin didn’t look like what it had once been. It looked like a wasteland.

   “He gave one of the buns to each one of us,” Angele said. “I was so happy.”

   What the churchman fixed up for them was passage to Bavaria. They ended up in the north of the southeastern state. Bavaria shares borders with Austria, Switzerland, and the Czech territories. The Danube and Main flow through it, the Bavarian Alps border Austria, and the highest peak in Germany is there. The Bohemian forests are nearby. The major cities of the region are Munich and Nuremberg. 

   “The bishop found a pig farm for us, people he knew,” Angele said. “We lived in a two-room apartment above the slaughterhouse. There was another Lithuanian with us, a woman in her 20s, a fancy woman.” One of the two rooms was a kitchen. They lived and slept in the larger room, two adults, a teenager, and four children. The fancy woman kept to herself. There was barely enough room to stand. There were three cots. 

“We took turns sleeping on them. We worked for our keep, helping with the cows, and cutting clover. There was no town, just country everywhere. The German family we stayed with fed us. They were good people.” There was no combat in their corner of the world. “We didn’t see any fighting all winter long,” said Angele. “The war ended when the Americans came. They wore nice uniforms, not like the Russians, who were filthy and stank. They were friendly, completely different. They threw candy to us as they went past.”

   Bavaria was one of Adolf Hitler’s favorite places during the twelve years of the planned one thousand year Third Reich. He had a lavish residence at the Obersalzberg. Bavaria had been the scene of protests against Nazi rule in the late 1930s, but it didn’t matter to the Fuhrer. He had his own dog-eat-dog security men. Their orders were to shoot first. They didn’t bother about questions. After the war Nuremberg was chosen for the military tribunals trying Nazi war criminals because it had been the ceremonial birthplace of the party. It was where their annual propaganda rallies were held.

   Allied air forces bombed the hell out of the city in 1944 and 1945. One night in January 1945 more than 500 British bombers dropped six thousand high-explosive bombs and more than a million incendiary devices. The historic old town was destroyed. Half of the rest of the city was destroyed. What wasn’t blown to bits or burnt down was damaged. Surviving the bombing meant you had to then survive the aftermath. The city was left with practically no heat, no electricity, and  no water supply in the middle of winter. The Palace of Justice and the prison that was part of the sprawling complex were spared. It was a sign of what was in store. It was spared because justice and revenge were in store.

   “In the fall after the war ended, we had to leave the pig farm and went to an American refugee camp near Regensburg. We had two rooms, but there was a Lithuanian man in the other room, so we had one room. We lived there and didn’t do anything. We waited and waited.”

   Before the Russians closed the borders, padlocking the Baltics behind the Iron Curtain, about 70,000 Lithuanians were able to escape the country, almost all of them ending up in Germany. By the time the war ended nearly 11 million refugees had flooded the country, more than the total population of Austria. Many of them ended up in Displaced Persons camps in Bad Worishofen, Nordlingen, and Regensberg.

   In the spring of 1946, Angele, Ona, and the children moved to a new camp. “It was a castle that you went to down a long road through a forest in front of a lake. There was a big chapel and two big barracks. There were no owners anymore, and no workers, nobody. There were only the Americans and refugees. There were many of us, all of us homeless. We were almost all Lithuanians.”

   The Schwarzenberg castle on the outskirts of Scheinfeld in Bavaria is northwest of Nuremberg. From 1946 until 1949 thousands of Lithuanians were housed at the DP camp there while they waited for their chance to get to Australia, Canada, the United States, anywhere somewhere else. “There was no future for us in Germany,” Angele said. There was flat out no going back. The system of revolving displacement the Russians proposed would have meant the end for many of them and suspicion and persecution for the rest of them. The Russians had no plans of letting repatriated Lithuanians off easy. They had no plans of letting any Lithuanians of any kind, unless they had converted to Communism, off easy. Even then it was dicey. If they wanted you to live and die in Siberia, the far east is where you went.

   The camp outside Nuremberg was administered by an American Army officer of Lithuanian descent. The military’s concern was providing shelter, nutrition, and basic health care. Although the Americans looked after vital supplies, everybody in the camp had to lend a hand, The refugees prepared their own food. They sewed new clothes from old cloth. They printed their own daily newspaper. They printed their own money, too. The currency could be earned by working around the camp and spent at the canteen, where you could buy shaving cream, combs, and cigarettes.

   “We had our own doctors, our own church, and even a school. My best friend was Maryte. Her parents were teachers. They taught the high school classes in the camp. Her mother knew how to sew.. She would take hand-me-downs that had been donated to us by the Red Cross, take them apart, and make new dresses. Whenever she made a dress for Maryte she made one for me, too.”

   Angeles’s aunt talked to her about becoming a seamstress. “She wanted me to learn how to sew, like my older brother Justinas, so I would have some way to make a living, but I said no.” She had already turned down her aunt’s advice back home about becoming a farmer’s wife. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to do, but she knew for sure what she didn’t want to do, which was no sewing and no farming.

   After her friend Maryte moved to Nuremberg, taking classes in x-ray technology, and was on the way to becoming a nurse assistant at the Army Hospital there, she wrote Angele. “She told me about it, told me it was a 10-month course, and told me to come join her.” Angele packed a satchel with her clothes and slipped away as the weather warmed up in 1947. She waved goodbye to Ona and her four children. “By then my aunt was teaching kindergarten at the camp and she had her kids around her.” The boy Mindaugas had grown a few years older, was now a full-fledged teenager, and could take care of his three sisters.

   She hitchhiked the forty miles to Nuremberg. Even though there were travel restrictions, a German government barely existed to enforce its own laws, and the only thing she had to worry about was an over-zealous American officer in a Jeep who might take her back to where she came from. When she got to Nuremberg she asked where the hospital was and found her way there. It had been rebuilt after the bombings two years earlier. She was assigned a bed in a small room, which was twelve feet by twelve feet. She shared it with three other women.

   “There was Ele, who was 24 and tall, Koste, who was 28 and stocky, Monica, who was the oldest and had been a nurse in Kaunas, and me. One of our teachers was Lithuanian and she helped me. We lived in the barracks. I worked in the hospital, cleaned, changed beds, and did whatever they told me to do. I studied whenever I could. There wasn’t time to do much else.”

   They had to do something, though. Most of them were young and raring to go. They staged dances at the hospital. “Somebody would play the accordion and we would all dance. There were never enough men to go around, so many had died.” Whenever they could they went to town on Saturdays. “We took a train, went to the movies, and the music shows. We loved it. Everything was so clean. It was all smashed during the war but two years later you wouldn’t have believed there had ever been a war.”

   There had not only been repeated bombing and shelling of the city, especially the medieval part of it, there had been street-by-street, house-to-house, and room-by-room fighting in April 1945. The city was rebuilt after the war and was partly restored to its pre-war aspect. “The Americans did it,” said Angele. “You could see them doing it every day.”

   The German government was being resurrected, as well, and order was the order of the day. “One day we were waiting in line for the movies, eating grapes, and spitting the seeds on the sidewalk. When a policeman saw us, he came over, and told us it was our responsibility to keep the city clean. He made us pick up all the seeds.”

   The circus was even better than movies or musical theater. It is in the movies and on stage that people fall in love and there is always a happy ending. The boy and girl kiss in a glowing haze. It is the circus, however, that leaves an in-the-flesh fantasy a vivid memory. “Whenever it came to town, none of us could sleep,” Angele said.

   The Nazi era was good for circuses since they were not considered subversive. They were left alone by the tyrants. Between the two wars, through the 1930s, Germany was the epicenter of  European circus companies and their large tents. There were more than forty of them on the road with clowns, acrobats, and animals. They were mostly family-run enterprises. The last year of World War Two, however, was bad for business. Many circuses lost all their equipment and animals. The postwar monkeyshines boomed after 1946. Circus Europa toured Germany in 1947. 

   “I loved the circus,” Angele said. “I would have gone alone if I had to.”

   In mid-summer 1948 she got a week’s vacation from the Army Hospital. She and her friend Benas, his best friend Porcupine, and two of the Porcupine’s friends took a train the 170 miles to Zugspitze on the border of Germany and Austria. On two sides of the Zugspitze are glaciers, the largest in Germany. Mountain guides lead climbers up three different routes to the summit at nearly ten thousand feet.

   “Benas had thick dark hair and his father was a minister back home. He was a good friend to me. Everybody called his friend Porcupine because my roommate Koste called him that, although nobody knew why. He thought he was Koste’s boyfriend, even though that’s not what she thought.”

   They got to the mountains at night and stayed in a small hotel. “There were two rooms at the end of the corridor. We three girls went into one of them. There were two beds, so we pushed them together and slept together. The boys took the other room. In the morning I went to the window and threw open the heavy drapes. I had to take a step back. The mountain was right there. I was astonished and frightened. For a second I thought it was going to fall in on us.”

   They rode a rack railway up the northern flank of the mountain the next day. “It went around and around.” At a landing they sunned themselves. “Even though there was snow everywhere, and people were skiing, looking like ants below us, we lay in the sun before going farther up.” They took the Eibsee cable car to an observation deck. “The gondola was all glass. You could see the whole world.” From the deck at the top a path led to a Cross of God.

   A 14-foot gilded iron cross had been lifted to the peak of the Zugspitze in 1851 by twenty-eight bearers under the direction of Karl Kiendl, a forester, and Christoph Ott, a priest. Father Ott was the brainstorm behind the cross, motivated by a vision of the mountain, “the greatest prince of the Bavarian mountains raising its head into the blue air towards heaven, bare and unadorned, waiting for the moment when patriotic fervor and courageous determination would see that his head too was crowned with dignity.”

   The Porcupine and his two companions wouldn’t go to where the cross was, patriotism or no patriotism. They said the path was too icy and narrow. “Only Benas and I went. There was a ladder attached to a rock face you had to climb to get to where the cross stood on a flat space.” In 1888 the cross had to be taken down and repaired after being struck by lightning. It had holes gouged out by the lightning bolts. A year later it was taken back to the top, onto the East Summit, where it had stayed ever since.

   The side rails of the metal ladder going up were secured by bolts to the rock. “I was near the top when a bolt came loose and the ladder jerked free,” Angele said. “I stopped and couldn’t go up or down. I stayed as still as I could. I was scared to death.”

   She had survived a Russian invasion, her mother’s untimely death, a subsequent German invasion, followed by another Russian invasion, making tracks out of Lithuania, the invasion of the Reich, the collapse of the German government, landing in DP camps in Bacaria, and finding her way to work at the Army Hospital In Nuremberg, all in the past 8 years, all by the time she was 19 years old. She was determined a broken ladder was not going to be the end of her. Benas helped her get down, extending his belt from the top, and another pilgrim helped her from below, coming partway up and slowly carefully easing her down. Benas slid down the side rails without incident.

   Faith can be church-going or it can be personal. Life and death at ten thousand feet is personal, Cross of God or no Cross of God. Who thinks about God when they are about to meet their maker? They took their time on the icy path back to the observation deck. The rest of the week they hiked, took local trains to nearby alpine towns, ate, drank, smoked, talked, and had fun while it lasted.

   At the end of their vacation they went back to Nuremberg. In her room, Angele thought about the men in her life. There were two of them. One of them was Vladas, who was a Baltic soldier. The other one was Vytas, a civilian, who worked for the Red Cross and worked the black market. They were both refugees from Lithuania, like her. Vladas brought her food and Vytas played cards with her. Vladas watched while she made dinner for him while Vytas let her win at the card table.

   Getting married might not be a matter of life and death, except when it is. She thought she was probably going to marry one of them, and thought she knew which one it would be, but she knew for sure she wasn’t going to be staying in Europe. She was going to break free of nowhere. Making her way some place where there was a future was the most important thing on her mind. She wanted a bright future, not a dark past. The only way was up the ladder, rung by rung. 

   No matter what, she was going to have to make what lay ahead worth its while. Nobody else was going to do it for her. When she got a visa to go to Canada and work as a nanny for thirteen children in Sudbury, an Ontario mining town, she took the chance. It was the chance she had been waiting for.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Atlantic Canada http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. 

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

“Captures the vibe of mid-century NYC, from stickball in the streets to the Mob on the make.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Fiction

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CRPSFPKP

Late summer and early autumn. New York City, 1956. Jackson Pollack opens a can of worms. President Eisenhower on his way to the opening game of the World Series where a hit man waits in the wings. A Hell’s Kitchen private eye scares up the shadows.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

By Ed Staskus

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.”

By Ed Staskus

   When my mother Angele was born it snowed until it got too cold to snow anymore. By the end of the month the thermometer rose to ten degrees below zero. When it warmed up the next month and the snow melted, a half-foot of slush was left behind. The next week there was heavy rain and her father’s fields were left under water. If it froze again there would be acres of ice rink. It froze and everybody went skating.

   “I was born in an area we called the New Farm, in Suvalkija, near Gizai,” said Angele. It was mid-January 1928.

   Suvalkija is the smallest of the five regions of Lithuania. It is girdled by the Nemunas River to the north and Poland to the south. The region’s identity was molded in the 19th century when it was a part of Congress Poland. Suvalkija was an agricultural area, generating substantial sugar beet harvests. Sugar beet yield in Lithuania in the early 20^th century was almost half what it was in the United States, even though the country is 151 times smaller than the United States.

   “My father’s name was Jonas Jurgelaitis. My mother’s name was Julija. I had four brothers and a sister. I was so happy when my sister was born. We lived on a small farm. It was three or four miles from Marijampole.”

   Marijampole is in the far south of Lithuania, bordering Poland and Kaliningrad. Lake Vistytis is nearby. The town was a center of book spreaders and freedom fighters in the long struggle leading to the country’s independence in 1918. Speaking Lithuanian was forbidden, but they did it anyway. Reading Lithuanian books was forbidden but they read them anyway. Many of them ended up in Russian prisons, where they spoke Lithuanian among themselves.

   Their farm was 10-some acres. The nearest neighbors were out of sight, even though they were nearby. Small woodlands of Scots Pine and Norway Spruce were scattered along the periphery of their land. Her father kept a pair of horses, three to four cows, lots of chickens, and a sounder of swine. Every week he loaded 10-gallon 90-pound milk cans into his wagon and took them to a local dairy. He rented croplands from a childless widow. The ground was devoted to sugar beets, a cash crop, harvested in early autumn.

   Suvalkija has less forest than any other part of Lithuania. It had long since been brought to bear for tillage. Kazlu Ruda, a large forest, nearly 230 square miles of it, is in Suvalkija, but it is on sandy soil that doesn’t work for farming. Rye, wheat, and barley have been cultivated in Lithuania for two thousand years. Potatoes got rolling three hundred years ago. The country has always been able to sustain itself with foodstuffs. After gaining home rule from the Russians, land reforms in 1922 turned over ground suitable for the plow to tens of thousands of new landowners. Two years later the Academy of Agriculture was established to oversee land exploitation and management.

   “My mother was tall and thin.,” Angele said. “She was pretty. She looked like a Romanian, even though she was born near where we lived. I didn’t look like her, at all. I looked like my father.” Her mother gave birth to eleven children in less than twenty years. Six of them survived infancy. Five of them survived World War Two, the forty-six-year subsequent Soviet occupation that happened next, and lived to see Lithuania regain its independence.

   Justinas was the oldest boy, born in 1919. “Justinas and my other older brother Bronius would invite their friends, and all the girls, to our house in the summer for dancing, before he joined the army.” Irena and the boys Sigitas and Jozukas were the youngest. Jozukas, the tenderfoot of the family, was two years old in 1938.

   Julija started suffering chest pains that year, losing her appetite and losing weight. She was diagnosed with tuberculosis, a major killer in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Almost ninety years later tuberculosis is still prevalent in Lithuania, one of the most highly TB-burdened countries in the world.

   “She went to the sanitorium in Kaunas the next year and got better.” When family responsibilities and the family’s finances called her back, she got worse. Angele helped with the housework and cooking. She kept up her schoolwork, kept up her chores, and with her two older brothers nursed their mother.

   “Irena and I went to a school in Gizai, which was less than a mile from our house. In the winter, when it was snowy, my father hitched one of the horses to a sled and took us there. I went for six years.” The family farm wasn’t far from Marijampole. It was forty miles southwest of Kaunas, the country’s second largest city. Vilnius, the largest city, home to nearly a half million, was eighty miles away. It might as well have been a million miles away.

   “Even though my father did everything, we all had to work, since we were poor.” There were no hired men or seasonal laborers. “I mixed feed for the pigs and fed them. We earned our money by growing sugar beets. Irena and I helped, but Sigitas and Jozukas were too small. We pulled them out of the ground in the fall and used a big knife to cut the leaves away. We threw them in a cart and when we had enough to fill our wagon, my father hitched a horse and took the beets to Marijampole.”

   The family home was a frame house, clapboard siding painted green, two stories, although the second story was an attic for storage and for smoking pork. “We had a barn, but we had another small house, too, a small barn where we kept wood for the fireplace.” They sawed and split their own cordwood. “On the second floor, up a ladder, there was rye and barley for bread. Justinas and Bronius slept in a room beneath the loft.” A brick-lined jumper duct fed heat from the house fireplace to the barn. Still and all, all winter long the young men gathered their blankets and warmed them up at the fireplace before going to bed. In deep winter in the Baltics the nights are 16 hours long. The stars twinkle but they are icy.

   Lithuania is a flat fertile country overlooking the Baltic Sea. The summers are mild, and the days are long, but the winters are longer. They are cold and dark. Temperatures often drop well below freezing. The ground is ice and snow-covered from mid-December to mid-March.

   “We had a dog, in a dog house next to the barn, whose name was Sargis.” Saugotis in Lithuanian means beware or watch out. “He was our guard dog, always tied up at night, who barked whenever a stranger came near. We had cats, too, who killed the mice and rats who ate our grain. We never let them into the house, though. They were only for the outside.” Barn cats lead a rough life, hunting vermin in outbuildings and fields. They sleep where they can, stay warm if they can. Living feral, they don’t live long. Whenever they could they snuck into the small, heated barn and slept under the blankets next to the two brothers.

   The family knew everybody in their neck of the woods. Everybody was wary of strangers. Although they had no immediate neighbors, her mother’s father, a tailor, lived nearby, and her father’s mother also lived within walking distance. “Whenever my mother made potato pancakes, she would give me a platter of them, and I took them to grandma’s house.” Her grandmother lived on the other side of the woods, with one of her father’s older sisters.

   After her mother got sick, from about the time she was ten years old, Angele did the cooking for the family. “My oldest brother Justinas helped me until he went into the army, and then Bronius helped.” She cooked pork logs, made soup, and served bread and butter every day. She washed the pots and pans and dishes and utensils twice a day.

   Justinas was apprenticed to a tailor, and learning the trade, but joined the army in the late 1930s. Every country cousin knew war was coming. “He became a cavalryman and was stationed near Marijampole. He rode home a few times, on his horse, in his uniform. He was so handsome.” He had just turned twenty-one. He didn’t know his horse was going to be useless in the coming war.

   When the Red Army invaded the Baltic states in June 1940, their troops numbering some fifty divisions, supported by armor and an air force, they swept the Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian forces aside in a matter of days. Justinas spent the rest of the war feeding his horse, and sewing and mending clothes, first under the thumb of the Russians, then the Germans, and then the Russians again.

   A woman whose husband had died and who lived nearby helped Angele learn to bake bread in their brick-lined oven. They made a half-dozen loaves at a time, kneading up to ten pounds of dough at a time, baking the free-standing loaves loosely arranged in front of a smoldering pile of coals that had been left burning for several hours. They kept the coals pushed to the back of the oven. They added wood as they needed it, shifting the fire from side to side. “We always had bread. We always had tea and sometimes coffee. When times were hard we collected herbs and had herbal tea.”

   The house did not have electricity or indoor plumbing. They had oil lamps and an outhouse and a well. There was a sink with a pump handle in the kitchen. “The outside well had a pulley and a bucket until we finally got a hand crank.” In January 1940 a bitter cold wave enveloped Lithuania, driving temperatures down to 40 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. The next month it crashed to 54 degrees below zero, the coldest in 160 years. The cats didn’t leave the small barn for weeks. The well froze. The Baltic Sea iced over. Some people froze to death and more than 10,000 throughout the Baltics were severely frostbitten, losing fingers and toes.

   When Julija had a relapse, she went back to the sanitorium in Kaunas, but returned home soon afterwards. “A taxi brought her back. My mother said she had to be with her children.” She was not fully recovered. When winter bore down again, she became run down and became bedridden. Jonas built an addition with a window, putting down rough planks over the packed dirt floor. He moved a free-standing cast iron furnace into the room. His wife died in her bed, the head of the bed facing the window, early the next spring. She was forty-three years old.

   Angele’s father re-married four months later. “He needed a woman to take care of Sigitas and Jozukas, my baby brothers.” Jonas had decided to ask the nearby widow with the farm, the woman who had helped Angele bake bread, but by then she was spoken for by another man. He found a single woman in Gizai and didn’t waste any time proposing.

   “Gizai was where we always went. My school was there, and there was a church, a police station with a policeman, and a hardware store that had everything. Whenever we had a coin we bought candy at the coffee shop there.”

   Jonas’s new wife was younger than Julija had been and healthy as a horse. She had a daughter a year older than Angele, even though she had never been married. The wedding was in early September. It wasn’t long after the move-in before Angele realized she couldn’t stay. “My new mother and my father started arguing. She loved the younger ones, and she loved her own daughter, but they started arguing about me. My father stood up for me, but he needed a wife. I don’t know what I was thinking, but one day I left.”

   It was late September. She packed a loaf of bread, some cold pork, what clothes she could carry, and a picture of her mother. She set off on foot in the morning for Alvitas, for her aunt’s house. Ona Kreivenas was her mother’s sister. Her aunt’s husband, a police captain, had been deported to Siberia by the Russians that summer, leaving her with three children and pregnant with a fourth. She could use a hand around the house.

   “I knew life wasn’t going to be any easier in Alytus, but I had to go,” Angele said

   Even though two German army groups smashed into the country in late June that summer, ousting the Russians, by then it was too late for Jonas Kreivenas, who didn’t come back from a slave labor camp in Siberia for nearly fifteen years, and when he did, found out his wife wasn’t in Lithuania anymore. She had fled post-war Europe. She was living in Philadelphia, in the United States.

   Alvitas is about fifteen miles from Gizai. It took Angele most of the day to walk there. She passed a prisoner of war camp crowded with Soviet soldiers captured by the Wehrmacht. One of them asked her for bread but she turned her head away. His war had amounted to little and ended in nothing. When she got to her aunt’s farm the sun was close to setting. 

   “I lived with my aunt for the next three years, until the Russians came again, and we had to run to Germany. I never went back home, except to visit, as a guest. I loved my father, and my brothers and sister, but I couldn’t go back.” When Angele woke up early the next morning, she had a new home and a new mother. “She was my parent now. They were my family.” She helped her aunt make breakfast. There was strong black tea at the table. The first frost wasn’t far away, but that morning was an Indian summer morning.

A version of this story appeared in Draugas News.

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