Lithuania
2003-02-10 - 5:54 p.m.
I'm working on a history project. It's about World War 2. It's making me think about Lithuania.
Someday we'll go to Lithuania. We'll walk down the railroad tracks until we reach the station just outside of Kaunas, where my grandmother and her brother fled Lithuania to escape the war. Lithuania had been independant since 1919, but Russia re-took Lithuania in 1940 and the German army invaded Lithuania in June 1941. Grandma's other brother had been drafted by the Russian army. Her oldest brother had escaped the draft for some reason, so he hid with my grandma, then 6 years old, in a storage crate on the train and fled the country. I never found out where they fled to, the story was hard to decipher when told to me Lithuanian mixed with broken English around the dinner table last Thanksgiving. Grandma hasn't seen her mother or father since her brother legally adopted her so they could come to Canada. My grandpa's father fought in Germany with the German Resistance until he was taken to a camp and poisoned.
I was supposed to go to Germany, then to Lithuania last March, and see my great grandmother who did not leave Lithuania, but survived the war and now lives in Vilinus. But the trip was cancelled because they didn't want me to go on a plane because of September 11th.
It feels...strange. to do a project on this and think about these people. I can't explain it. I think I'll post an excerpt from Dan Bern's song, "Lithuania". Dan Bern's relatves were Lithuanian Jews who fled Lithuania before the Russian invasion. My relatives were Lithuanian Catholics who fled Lithuania after the Russian invasion. Sometimes I wonder if they were from Shaki, which was the main Jewish community in Lithuania during that time...that would've meant that his relatives would have lived about 50 kilometres away from my relatives in Kaunas.
Excerpt from "Lithuania" by Dan Bern:
I'd like to be a good American and write an elegy to the automobile
But no matter where it takes me I don't really feel any different
I got one foot in the black and white two dimensional ghosts of Lithuania
And the other foot in sunny California where the people are all friendly
As they drive their Mercedes to the mini-malls and take a lunch
Or network with you or drive past and kill you for no reason
These are my ghosts: Uncle Emmanuel, Uncle Eli, Aunt Mia
And my grandparents, Jenny and Tobias, none of whom I've ever met
I saw some letters once that they wrote to my dad in Palestine in 1940
Not too long before they all were shot
My only link to them is my dad, he knew them, he knew me, now he's gone too
Sometimes I want to get next to them, sometimes I want to drive them all away
Say: You're not my ghosts, I live in Sunny California, I drive a 1992 Red Chevrolet
I drive fast, and I drive as far west as anyone can drive
Eight thousand miles from Lithuania and if I could escape
By driving further then I would, but it doesn't get me anyplace new
I guess if I was a true American, I could write an elegy to the automobile
But when I jump in it doesn't get me any place different
Sometimes I want to dance on Hitler's grave
And shout out: Groucho Marx, Lenny Bruce, Leonard Cohen, Philip Roth,
Bob Dylan, Albert Einstein, Leonard Bernstein, Harry Houdini, Sandy Kofax!
And then I want to sing as loud as I can
Watch the chandeliers sway dangerously overhead
Proclaiming Kristalnacht is over
I say Kristalnacht is over! The only broken glass tonight
Will be from wedding glasses shattered under boot heels
We're not the ones in the museum, its you,
Your curious mustache and your chamber of horrors
I've a friend my age whose parents met in Auschwitz on the Day of Liberation
She lives in San Francisco, a good job, just moved into a new house
I've a friend who lies in her hospital bed
After fifteen operations from a botched appendectomy
I go to visit her with a heart heavy from the things on my mind,
And she cheers me up.
I saw my dad tell jokes, and teach me how to laugh,
Thirty years after his parents, and brothers, sister were all shot,
Murdered in the streets of Lithuania
I see trees growing tall and the sun coming up, and the ocean roaring home,
And know I must go on I must go on
It would be cowardly to stop
It would be an aberration to do anything else
When something is over, something else begins
The end of the century is coming
Like a blind woman relentlessly spinning
But before its sewn shut
You wanted to scream: Hold on just a minute, was this just a dream?
Or is there something to learn
Besides who got the gold,
And who's been losing and winning?
But a century's a man-made process
An attempt to stick order on chaos
We're born with ten fingers
So we count up to ten
But if everyone counted the cracks on the wall
We might all count to three, and then it wouldn't be
The end of the century at all
C'mon we'll drive up the coast
Its a Tuesday or Thursday
But I can't remember, and I don't care
We'll drive to Seattle or else Oklahoma
Or else if we wanna a boat to Hawaii
Or maybe Japan with the kings of karaoke
Come out!
Come on out girl, you gotta come out now
Maybe the only thing jumping in the car and driving can get us
Is an empty tank of gas
But it sure beats sitting around here
Maybe we'll get lucky, find our own private river valley
Or at least an all-night diner where they know how to poach an egg
Maybe we'll meet some good people along the way
And anyway, you know I'll never leave you
I'll never leave you
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