A tourism campaign for Vilnius, Lithuania, declared itself “the g-spot of Europe,” because, “Nobody knows where it is, but when you find it—it’s amazing.”

The spot, so to speak, is lovely, if not amazing, but the people are nothing short of amazing.  Actually heroic.  And that has everything to do with its location.

Why would anyone spend their travel dollars to go to Lithuania, one might ask?  My husband and I spent many travel dollars and seven days in Lithuania.  Why?  Location, location location.  It is a short flight from Norway, where my newly pregnant morning/noon/night sick daughter and her Viking husband live, and they could get there easily to spend a few days with us.

Lithuania is the largest of the three Baltic states (including Latvia and Estonia) which have been independent from the Soviet Union for just 32 years.  It is located in Eastern Europe and is now bordered by the independent nations of Belarus, Latvia, Poland, and Russia. And it is very near Ukraine.

The driving distance from Kyiv, Ukraine, to Vilnius, Lithuania, is about 450 miles—about the same distance as it is from Cincinnati to Atlanta.  Both Kyiv and Lithuania are less than 500 miles from Moscow.

Because of its proximity to the former Soviet Union and its strategically important location, Lithuania has a long history of occupation:  by the Soviets, then the Germans, and, again, the Soviets. It has been the crosswalk of empires, a march through.  It’s proximity to Russia is always worrisome to its citizens.  Location, location, location.

As the horrible images of the warfare in Ukraine flash on my screens, I am reminded of its neighbors, the Lithuanians.  When we visited in 2019, they expressed alarm at the U.S. coziness with Russia.  Several citizens reminded us that Lithanians are strong NATO supporters and that they fulfill their monetary obligations for the military.

Photo credit: By Pofka 1

¹

The KGB building, located in a Vilnius residential neighborhood, is where crimes of the Soviet regime were planned and executed for fifty years.  The stately white structure gives no hint of the dank prison and torture rooms inside. There is an Lithuanian expression:  “You could see Siberia from the KGB prison,” because this is where the deportation of political dissidents and intelligentsia to Siberia was ordered.

While visiting the open-air Folk Museum, where buildings from different Lithuanian locations and historical periods have been reconstructed, we saw cattle cars that transported deportees to Siberia and a replica of mud homes they constructed on the tundra once there.  It is there we met one of the irrepressible Lithuanians, 91-year-old Irene Spakauskiene, who survived deportation and, remarkably, thrived afterwards.

The Soviet Union never acknowledged that they deported peaceful people, but Irene was just 13 in 1941 when she, her mother, father, and brother were taken from their homes and loaded on one of these cattle cars. As they went through towns, the citizens were told that the cars were transporting thieves and prostitutes. Irene’s father was separated from the rest of the family, and they later learned he was executed.

Irene described the conditions in the train car.  There were 50 people with no open windows for a month-long journey to their first stop, a forest where they worked 16 hours a day for a year cutting trees.  They could not imagine it could get worse, but it did.

The prisoners were then transported above the Arctic Circle.  No housing was provided, so they had to work together digging in the tundra for mud and scouting on the beach for driftwood.  They were only permitted the smallest pieces of wood, as the larger pieces were designated for the soldiers to feed their fires.   Forty people lived in these mud huts, what they call yurts.

After six years on that island, some university students came to study what they thought was a community, not a prison camp, and they rescued her.  She couldn’t return to Lithuania where she was an considered an escaped prisoner, so instead she spent years in Latvia.

For a period of time the Russian government allowed young people from the group, Union of Deportees, to go to Siberia to take care of their relatives’ cemeteries.  Irene found her mother’s body, which hand not been buried but left out in the open arctic air.  Her body was still frozen and perfectly preserved.

That Irene was able to survive is almost unfathomable, but that she managed to go to medical school and become a physician is evidence of her resilience.  Remarkable, too, that she was able to love again, to marry and to have a daughter, two grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.

As I listened to Irene speak, I considered my own strength. I can’t imagine I could have endured such hardships from age 13 to 19, nor that I could have had the courage to tell this story repeatedly to strangers.  That I could be warm, physically or emotionally, after six years living in Siberia.

We heard many similar stories there.  Another I recall was about three teenagers who were just picked up off the street by Soviet soldiers and deported to Siberia.  They weren’t committing any crimes; they were just three able-bodied kids knocking about.  The boys managed to escape Siberia, illegally hopping on trains.  One of the boys fell while trying to board and was injured.  He was taken to a hospital where they amputated his leg—without anesthesia.  This gentleman survived and thrived.  He became a professor.

During the Nazi occupation during World War II, 90 % of Lithuania’s Jewish population was murdered.  Unlucky location.

I have many fears about our country—the division, the hate, the racism, the guns—but I have never feared occupation by a foreign country, largely because of our lucky location.

Since Lithuania’s independence from the Soviet Union, just 32 years ago, the people have shown their hardiness, their ingenuity, their hope. Capitalism has taken hold and people have reinvented themselves.  The streets are lined with cafes and shops and hotels.  There are few remnants of their communist past.

Lithuania has its charms, for sure.  It is a flat country—they say you can look out your window and see who is arriving tomorrow—but It has lush forests and quiet beaches.

A zeppelin

The cuisine leans heavily (pun intended) toward meat and potatoes, and one of its special dishes is a dumpling aptly nicknamed a zeppelin. If you like mushrooms, Lithuania is the place to go; as Lithuanians quip,  “All of our mushrooms are edible, but some you only eat once.”

If you covet unique jewelry, there is amber for sale, of the genuine and the knock-off varieties, available everywhere.  Amber is fossilized tree resin. If you have keen eyesight you might find small pieces of amber on the beach.  And if you are a good shopper, you’ll find a piece that has an insect preserved in the resin for millions of years.

Insect in Amber

Preserved in the Lithuanian history and that of the other Baltic countries is their unlucky geographical location.

Searching for amber at the beach

Imagine living there right now.

There are still politicians and TV personalities who say Ukraine’s independence just doesn’t matter much, like it’s just a twig on the world’s massive democratic tree.  Look at the map to see how many slender branches there are, right near that twig. How indestructable is that trunk?

We are all Lithuanians now.  We are all Ukranians now.²

¹ Photo Attribution:  By Pofka – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=109981327

² President Kennedy’s 1963 speech about the Berlin Wall, he said, ”Two thousand years ago, the proudest boast was civis romanus sum[“I am a Roman citizen”]. Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is “Ich bin ein Berliner!”… All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words ‘Ich bin ein Berliner!’”

To learn more about deportations to Siberia, I highly recommend the book Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys.  Irene Spakauskiene said much of her story was incorporated in this work of fiction.  Ashes in the Snow is the movie based on the book.  Both the book and movie are available from Amazon.

For background on the Soviet Union and the Cold War, read Forty Autumns:  A Family’s Story of Courage and Survival on Both Sides of the Berlin Wall.

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