I traveled to Lithuania to learn more about my family history, with two Swedish women with the same interest. Our families intersected in the period 1920 through 1940.

We hired an English-speaking guide to make it an efficient experience. The guide drove us from Vilnius to Siauliai and back, over three days. He was wonderful.

It was intense, magical.

My mother was 93 in 2013 and never “took” to email. She had a cell phone but it was not “smart” and she could not send/receive a text message. She barely left voice mail, not sure how it worked. She heard about the amazing things to be found on the Internet but never saw them with her own eyes.

(For example, Google Earth could show her the childhood home in Lithuania. Wikipedia has dozens of pages on her noble ancestors, including a page on her family estate. There are Lithuanian wikipedia pages on HER OWN FATHER and HER HOME.)

At least a decade before Skype, I bought two phone devices with cameras that would display the faces of the callers on both ends. They cost about $200 each. You had to use the device instead of a telephone, and there was a simple sequence to trigger the camera. Not intuitive, but it seemed feasible. We made TWO phone calls using them. During one, I could see my brother and others through the dark screen; they were visiting my mother for Easter. The lighting was terrible. We looked awful. My brother pushed the buttons you needed to push. After that, they sat unused, garbage.

I also got her an “email machine” for $100 that worked like a fax machine. I could send email to her email address (which was the machine). She could “check the inbox,” and push a “print” button to print the message. (Of course you needed to keep paper in the thing.) This was skipping the steps of putting paper into an envelope and mailing it. Monthly cost $10-15 for the service. After two years, and almost ZERO activity, it was removed from the house, garbage.

Many things have happened that improve our lives unimaginably. The kids just don’t know what they’ve got in their hands, with parents paying for the internet and phone service connections.

Here are my thoughts, speaking as someone who went through graduate school BEFORE PHOTOCOPIERS.

·        If you want to remember a restaurant or write down the title of a book, now, you simply photograph it with your phone.

·        If you need to repair something, you can take a picture (e.g. plumbing) and show it to the person in the hardware store (who is often a woman, now).

·        If you see something (a nice pattern? a weird thing? a meal?), you can snap it on your phone.

·        You can go anywhere and still tell somebody else “I am running late” and “Where are you in the parking lot?” using text.

·        With digital cameras in nearly every pocket, we are capturing our personal lives to excess. Before, you would get your film developed (asking for the 2-copies option) and mail one to Mom.

·        We can make digital photo albums and print them or share them online. You can make a copy of THE ONE FAMILY ALBUM that everybody wants.

·        We can see and talk to someone across the world FOR FREE, AS LONG AS YOU WANT. (Hint: You need a computer, Internet access, and something like Skype.) When I was in India in 1971, a phone call was $30-$50. An air-letter (the lightest paper possible) could take WEEKS to arrive.

·        You can send a copy of an important document (your driver’s license) immediately, via text + photo from your cell phone.

·        If you forgot the name of a writer or a book or where to buy something, you can google it using your phone while you are talking.

My mother didn’t learn computer technology although some of it was already common for thirty years. Remember when we stopped developing film and you abandoned your film camera for the tiny thing in your pocket? Which is also a phone, now?

I studied “the Digital Divide” in the 90’s and after. People without computers could not use digital cameras because they could not upload the pictures easily. You had to know how to use the computer to do that. With phones, now, they can snap, store and show without a computer. The smart phone IS the computer.

Now I am aware of very senior seniors who “don’t open attachments” on email, who don’t know what to do with a “website” or “URL;” who “are not really on email;” who have trouble filling out forms or signing up for things or buying tickets when they are ONLY AVAILABLE online.

Did you know that you could visit a family gathering across the world and talk to everybody, see the baby, see the house, see the garden, hear the music—with a smart phone and Skype, FOR FREE?

Being thirty years out of date is a long time. The big barriers are: knowledge (what’s out there, what’s easy, where to get it); cost (smart phone or tablet, WiFi, smart phone service); and comfort.

I think we need an army of “catchers in the rye” who patiently bring along those who just aren’t going to move along. Seniors might have children and grandchildren help the learning. Libraries are our communal solution. Watch the lines of people waiting libraries to open who rush in to claim a seat at a computer. And take a class.

In the Third World, illiterate villagers picked up on smart phones as fast as a single one could be bought and shared. Phone entrepreneurs will rent time on their phones—they become the phone and internet station for the community. I hear that villagers can check market prices for the few goods they will carry on their heads to the market, they can bank using the phone, they’ll talk to relatives far away. Word that these things were possible traveled very fast. It wasn’t too hard because it became a magical life-line.

On Thursday (July 9, 2015) I'll be in Lithuania and meet up with two Swedish women. We'll go to Siauliai, the region where our grandfathers lived during a possibly charmed and exuberant era in Lithuanian history when life was free and good after WWI. Agricultural cooperatives were being formed, farming was booming, they were seeking and exploring new innovations. A Lithuanian farm and estate hosted a Swedish family who consulted on building the country’s capacity to farm and export.

We’ll visit some plain old buildings, spread through the region that used to comprise the multiple homes of my aristocratic forefathers. How grand is that? I’ve seen them, and buildings don’t come alive unless you can picture people in them. We don’t have many photos of our people. The buildings have been converted into schools and offices. Not too exciting.

What we know about the period (1920 to 1940) I’ve learned from my grandfather’s memoir, which was written during the Soviet occupation and thus may have been carefully composed. It’s fairly impersonal by our modern confessional standards. It's about the development of agricultural cooperatives and exports, not much about the personal life of the family or opinions about conditions in Lithuania after the Soviet occupation. Very factual. We do learn, however, that the family liked to hold musical evenings (in times before radio and TV), and many played instruments and entertained gatherings in the manor house.

The Zubovs (our noble line) started a number of schools in the region, especially schools for girls. The communists might say that the peasants on estates were a near step to slavery, but my picture is benign: health, welfare, and education of the whole community were tended. The aristocracy built community and enjoyed life. My grandfather was a committed socialist.

We won’t see any of that when we visit. My hope is to recover the feeling of friendship, comradery, maybe even hope, between my family and the Swedes’ ancestors. We are two generations removed. The affinity of our grandfathers during 1920-1940 is echoed two generations down the road.

How did this happen? My grandfather wrote a short memoir, maybe 50 pages, in Lithuanian. My mother and her siblings had a copy and had it published (1997) by a local museum, which sought to recover the history of the region, especially after Lithuanian independence in 1991. I received a copy from my mother with no information about context—when was it written, how did it come to be published, where was it distributed, etc. How anybody felt about it?

However, my mother taught me to read Lithuanian a little past “kitchen talk." She spoke to me in Lithuanian until she died in 2013.

When I retired in 2006, I traveled to Lithuania to work on a translation. My friend Erika took me to a bookstore on Day 1 and I bought a giant Lithuanian-English dictionary. (I’ve studied five other languages and loved translation.) During 10 days, while staying in a former convent, I looked up every word I didn’t know and hand-wrote a translation. My uncle and mother in America checked it and repaired some seriously wrong interpretations. (There are others in the family who know English and Lithuanian better than me, but I am a happy translation drone.) I never met my grandfather and it was a way to get to know him.

In my early discovery of do-it-yourself-publishing, a technological and financial milestone, I put together the little book and published it “open to the public” thinking mostly family would pick it up. Over 50 people around the world have picked up the 99-cent PDF.

One of them was in Sweden. She emailed; we Skyped. I visited for one day during which we talked for 10 ½ hours. We decided we should travel back in time together. I think we both want to recover a sense for our grandfathers and their lives during a good period, before WWII ruined everything.

This isn’t going back to my past life or my early life. It’s going back to my grandfather’s earlier life—back to 1920 and on, through the window of 2015. It’s also the period of my mother’s childhood. We’ll look for clues, atmosphere, scenery, cultural vibes. The year 1920 is nearly one hundred years ago, so there aren’t many witnesses.

A lot of Jews go back to places in Europe with a similar wish: to see the life of their ur-families when it was “normal.” Maybe even “flourishing,” although we’ll never know the whole truth. There were Jewish families flourishing in Siauliai at that time too. Most of them lost everything including their lives. 

My grandparents were not murdered. They were locked away by the Soviet occupation and died before I could meet them.

There are a few people who encourage me to share my trip reports which are mostly a small photo album. Here are two.

One is hiking up the Annapurna Valley in Nepal with an adventure travel group in 2013.

The other is hiking in the Alps around Mt. Blanc with Road Scholars in 2014. 

My parents, like many other people who suffered and survived World War II as civilians, were reluctant to talk about it. This left me with a poor appreciation of the sacrifices they’d made to escape death and oppression. There were many stages of their suffering that started with the invasions of Lithuania by the Germans and the Soviets in 1940 :

·        Experience the overnight presence of military who conducted targeted and random killings and captures of civilians, and who took over your family’s manor house as officer's quarters

·        The decision to flee with a baby in a buggy, my mother pregnant, and start a journey of about 600 miles along country roads with thousands of others, desperate for safety

·        Finding shelter during a long trek through foreign towns and properties

·        Finding food and stealing potatoes when you risked your life to do it

·        My mother giving birth in a clinic about 100 miles south of Berlin, in the American Sector, in 1945

·        Moving into Displaced Person camps for shelter, food, health care after the Germans surrendered, in an environment of severe food shortages, vast destruction of infrastructure, hostility and distrust between most ethnic/language groups

·        Gaining permission to emigrate to the USA in 1949

·        Arriving with nothing, in New York City

·        Working as the night cleaning crew to make a living, having no professional credentials in America

·        Moving to Utah where my father could work in a coal mine

·        Etc.

Of course as a child I focused on what I didn’t have. I didn’t realize that what my parents gave me was life and sustenance, and a chance to do better. It was only through heroic persistence and resourcefulness that they escaped death for all of us. My child’s mind didn’t realize that, and they didn’t tell me and my siblings enough to give us any understanding.

Lithuanians who stayed behind were a) sent to starve or die of disease in the Gulag or b) lived in oppression, fear and poverty under the Soviets for 45 years, during most of which communication with the “outside” was forbidden. It was a police state.

I have been able to reconstruct the conditions of their flight from political murder, finally. There are many recent “émigré” stories. Some are self-published and might never been published if not for the recent ability to self-publish. There’s been an explosion of information and an explosion of understanding in my mind.

Here are my best sources:

Mark Wyman, DPs: Europe’s Displaced Persons, 1945-1951 (Cornell U Press, 1989)

Edward R. Janusz, Fading Echoes from the Baltic Shores (2012)

Ellen Cassedy, We Are Here: Memories of the Lithuanian Holocaust (U of Nebraska Press, 2012)

Ona Algminiene, The Crimson Blight (1968, translated to English 2014)

Julija Sukys, Epistolophilia: Writing the Life of Ona Simaite (U of Nebraska Press, 2012)

“The Invisible Front”  movie (2014)  

Aleksandra Kasuba, On the Way to America (2010)