By Ed Staskus

   “The bishop fixed it up for us,” said Angele Jurgelaityte. Life wasn’t a cabaret during the ferocious last days of World War Two. It was a maelstrom. It helped to have a man of the cloth on your side when the devil was doing his damnedest on the other side.

   When Angele, 16 years old, Ona Kreivenas, her aunt, and Ona’s four children, Mindaugas, Carmen, Ramute, and the new kid on the block, Gema, got off one of the last trains the Prussian Eastern Railway ran from East Prussia to Berlin in late 1944 they were met at the station by Bishop Vincentas Brizgys.

   The clergyman was Ona’s husband’s cousin. Her husband, a Chief of Police, had been arrested by the Soviets in 1941 and deported to Siberia, where he was stuck in a slave labor camp. Bishop Brizgys was the assistant to the archbishop of Kaunas. In the summer of 1944, he and the archbishop and more than two hundred other Lithuanian priests fled the country on the skirt of retreating German forces.

   In the fall a drove of other Lithuanians barreled out of the Baltics as the Red Army swarmed the Wehrmacht and overran the land. The fighting was thick tenacious terrible. Wartime losses of Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians were among the highest in Europe. They didn’t go down without a fight.

   Ona had somehow located the bishop by telephone, 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 didn’t look like the churchman he was. Berlin didn’t look like what it had once been.

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

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

   “The bishop found a pig farm for us, people he knew. We lived in a two-room apartment above the slaughterhouse. There was another Lithuanian with us, a woman in her 20s, a fancy woman,” said Angele. One of the two rooms was a kitchen. They lived and slept in the larger room, two adults, two teenagers, and three children. There was barely room to stand. The fancy woman kept to herself. “We slept on cots.” Fourteen years later, she and my father and my sister, brother, and I slept on cots our first months in Cleveland, Ohio. I was the oldest and just short of seven years old.

   “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. 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 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 stern-faced security force. Their orders were to shoot first. After the war Nuremberg was chosen for the military tribunals trying Nazi war criminals because it had been the ceremonial birthplace of the party. Their annual propaganda rallies were held there.

   Allied air forces bombed the hell out of it in 1944 and 1945. In January 1945 more than 500 British bombers dropped six thousand high-explosive bombs and more than a million incendiary devices on the city. 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 bombardment meant you had to then try to survive the aftermath.. The city was left with practically no heat no electricity no water supply in the middle of winter. The Palace of Justice and the prison that was part of the large complex were spared. It was a sign of what was in store. It was spared because retribution was in the air.

   “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.”

   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. When 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 again moved to a new camp. “It was a castle that you got 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 more than thousands of us. We were all Lithuanians.”

   The Schwarzenberg castle on the outskirts of Scheinfeld in Bavaria is northwest of Nuremberg. From 1946 until 1949 many thousands of Lithuanians were housed at the DP camp there while they waited for their chance to get to Australia, Canada, the United States, somewhere anywhere else.

   “There was no future for us in Germany,” said Angele. There were no going back plans, either. There was flat out no going back. The system of revolving displacement would have meant the end for many of them and suspicion and persecution for the rest. The Russians had no plans on letting repatriated Lithuanians off easy. They had no plans on letting any Lithuanians of any kind, unless they had converted to Communism, off easy. Even then it was dicey.

   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 lent a hand, The refugees prepared their own food. They sewed new clothes from cloth and old clothes they took apart. 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, too. 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 learning to become 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 turned down her aunt’s advice at home about becoming a farmer. She had no plans sewing for a living, either. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to do, but she knew for sure what she didn’t want to do, which was no farming and no sewing.

   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 one morning in 1947. She said goodbye to Ona and her four kids. “By then my aunt was teaching kindergarten at the camp and she had her children around her.” Mindaugas was grown a few years older, now a teenager, and could take care of his three sisters.

   When Angele left, she left more space for them in their quarters. 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 bombardments two years earlier. She was assigned a bed in a small room, twelve feet by twelve feet, sharing it with three other women.

   “There were four of us, me, Ele, who was 24 and tall, Koste, who was 28 and stocky, and Monica, who was the oldest and had been a nurse in Kaunas. One of our teachers was Lithuanian and she helped me. We lived in the barracks at the hospital. 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 very much else.”

   They had to do something, though. Most of them were young. They staged dances at the hospital. “Somebody would play the accordion.” 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 even 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 room-to-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 was in the movies and theater that people fell in love and everything was a happy ending. It is the circus that leaves in-the-flesh fantasy a vivid memory. “Whenever it came to town, none of us could sleep.”

   The Nazi era was good for circuses since they were not considered subversive. They were left alone by the regime. Between the two wars, through the 1930s, Germany was the epicenter of the European companies and their large tents. There were more than forty travelling circuses with clowns, acrobats, and animals. They were mostly family-run enterprises.

   The last year of the Second World War, however, was bad for business, many circuses losing all their equipment and animals. The postwar years boomed again after 1946. Circus Europa toured Germany in 1947. “I loved the circus. I would have gone alone if I had to,” Angele said.

   In mid-summer 1948 Angele 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. 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 big window and threw open the heavy drapes. I had to take a step back. The mountain was right there. I was astonished and afraid. For a second I thought it was going to fall in on us.”

   They rode a rack railway the next day up the northern flank of the mountain. “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.

   The 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 the cross. The path was too icy and narrow, they said. “Only Benas and I went. There was a ladder attached to a rock face you had to climb to get to it, where it stood on a flat space.”

   In 1888 the cross had to be taken down and repaired after being struck many times by lightning. It was leaning and scarred, holes gouged out by the lightning flashes. 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 there,” 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 death, a subsequent German invasion, followed by another Russian invasion, making tracks out of Lithuania, what looked like unending separation from her family, landing in DP camps in Bavaria, the American invasion of the Reich, the collapse of the German government, and finding her way to work at the Army Hospital In Nuremberg, all in the last 8 years, all by the time she was 19 years old.

   She was determined a broken ladder was not going to break her, not be the end of her. Benas helped her from the top, extending his belt, and another pilgrim helped her from below, coming partway up and slowly carefully easing her down. Benas quickly slid down the side rails without incident.

   Faith can be churchy, or it can be personal. There isn’t anything that’s a matter of life and death except life and death. Life and death at ten thousand feet is personal, cross or no cross. 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 had fun while it lasted.

   At the end of their vacation, they went back in Nuremberg. In her room, alone for a few minutes, Angele thought about the man in her life. There were two of them, Vladas the soldier and Vytas the civilian, working for a relief organization. They were both refugees from Lithuania, like her. Vladas brought her food and Vytas played cards with her. Vladas watched while she made dinner 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. Making her way somewhere where there was a future was the most important thing on her mind.

   She wanted a bright future, not a dark past. She had to go and find it. The man she married would have to be the man who wanted to go with her. The only way up was up the ladder, rung by rung. No matter what, she was going to have to make the days that lay ahead up for herself. Nobody else was going to do it for her.

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.”

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 it was an Indian summer.

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.”