Our flights are booked, the hotel has been chosen, it’s really happening, after all these years of kids and Covid and Russian aggression: I will be visiting Memel/Klaipėda come July, with my dearest Bruderherz in tow, attempting to navigate travel with chronic illness alongside going ‘auf Spurensuche’ – a phrase that just doesn’t translate well into English but in this context refers to returning to the homeland of your family to get a sense of where your ancestors came from. I’m excited – and nervous – and determined to get some more thoughts on the page before we go.
The world is a different one from when I last published a post on this blog. The trauma of living through a global pandemic has affected us all, and both this and the war in Ukraine have steeled my resolve to get to what was once Prussian Lithuania sooner rather than later. And yet the area south of the Neman/Nemunas/Memel river, particularly Tilsit (modern day Sovetsk), is now truly off limits, falling as it does in the Russian Kaliningrad exclave. This is a bitter pill to swallow, and I am kicking myself for not having made it there when the window of opportunity was open. My family’s lives played out across the whole river delta, intertwining on both sides, and there is much on the southern side of the river that I will just have to make do with staring at from the Lithuanian-Russian border. I won’t be standing outside the former prison where Oskar was held in solitary confinement, or visiting the spot where the church once stood in which Emil married, or visiting the former Gestapo HQ where Johanne was once interrogated. Google StreetView will have to continue to scratch that itch.
However, our three days in Klaipėda should allow us the opportunity to get a feel for the city where much of the twentieth century action took place. We plan to spend one day in the city, searching out the streets and buildings in which various members of the family worked, lived and went to school (including Hospitalstraße 22!), along with visiting the place where Oskar died during the Russian advance in October 1944. I am also keen to visit the homes and shops of some of Memel’s Jewish inhabitants that I have read much about in recent years. For many of them, there is no one to go ‘auf Spurensuche’ from their own families, and I sit with this knowledge, often.
A second day will be spent relaxing on the Curonian spit, energy levels dependent. We will probably stick to Sandkrug/Smiltynė, a resort my grandmother would have known well, and will kick about on the dunes and walk through the forest. If I am feeling particularly adventurous and energised I would dearly love to get the bus to Schwarzort/Juodkrantė, a beautiful and less touristy resort town, or even Perwelk/Pervalka, where Odo was last seen by comrades of Oskar’s in late 1944, looking for his father, but that will depend on my symptom level on the day.
The third day will involve hiring a car and driving to the many places burned into my memory from reading the documents: Heydekrug/Šilutė, the county town of the Kreis where both Oskar and Johanne grew up, Rudienen/Rudynai and Paszieszen/Pašyšiai where they were born, Übermemel/Panemunė on the Russian border, the last place Johanne walked across the bridge to before being caught up by the front in October 1944, Pogegen/Pagėgiai, where the family lived from 1934-9, plus a few other places if there is time. Happily, my brother has offered to do the driving.
Sadly, the archive work I need to do in Vilnius will have to wait for another trip, but in all honesty I have much to be getting on with before that, and before July I’m hoping to get stuck into the nitty gritty of Oskar’s imprisonment based on the documents I have. Watch this space! It all depends on my symptom levels, and I am drawn to the fact that Johanne was never able to work once she had settled down after the Flucht, as she was written off as arbeitsunfähig by a doctor in the early 1950s. I wonder how much her commendable efforts to gain post-war compensation were hampered by her chronic symptoms, variously described as circulatory problems, nerve pain and heart issues. I’ve been struck by the way shared experiences can open up new ways of looking at life.
Hospitalstraße 22 