Day 5, Enroute to Klaipeda Lithuania - Rumsiskes

Interior of rural house including bathtub

Early farmhouse

Siberia survivor

Showing map of the route to Siberia

Visit to the Village Museum

On the way to the next place we will stay (Klaipeda) we visited an 40 acre museum about rural life in Lithuania in the 1700s and 1800s. Beautiful thatched roof buildings, each house with a flower garden. The buildings were moved here from other locations. Sort of like the Williamsberg of Lithuania. There were also livestock and other trappings of the village life. A local guide gave an excellent explanation of evertything we were seeing. The houses were furnshised with items of the time.

At the end of this tour, we had an extra touching experience. A small group of survivors of a little told story have established a setting to tell the very sad story of what happened to Lithuanians sent to Siberia in 1941. The Soviet soldiers arrived in 1941. One of these survivors, an 80 year old woman, told us her personal story as she showed us the railroad car in which they were transported and the yurt they lived in on the Artic Sea in eastern Siberia. Most of these people were kept in Siberia until 1988 after Gorbachoff came into power.

She was 13 years old when the soldiers arrived. Her father was a college professor. He was killed immediately and her mother and her brothers and sisters were sent to Siberia along with many other families. It was June so they were not dressed warmly. They were not allowed to take anything with them. The were locked in a small rail car, 65 people in one car, in which they were unable to leave for a month. They were given very little to eat or water to drink. Many people died during the trip.

They stopped for some time in a town quite a way south of the Artic ocean. The prisoners subsisted by eating leaves and then their captors decided that "not enough of them were dying so that they should take them further north.

Eventually they were taken off the rail car in Siberia on the Artic ocean where it was now August and already snowing. There were no trees and very little vegetation. They constructed a yurt type structure out of mud and straw and this is what the lived in for years. I can’t remember exactly how many people lived in one yurt but maybe 50 and things got more spacious inside that first year as 50% of them died. The ground was frozen so they couldn't bury their dead so they kept the bodies stacked inside the yurt until the spring though when they were able to put them in the ocean to float out to sea.

The group was divided into 2 groups the children and teenagers and the adults. They did forced labor 7 days a week. The work they did was primarily fishing using nets and just trying to stay alive. The Soviet guards didn’t help them at all. The fish the Lithuanians got had to be turned over to the guards. If anyone was caught stealing a fish they received an additional 5 year sentence. They had to survive on bread but this was nearly impossible as they were issued ration cards that permitted them to get a meager amount of bread but had to pay a price that exceeded what they earned. We asked how she managed to survive and she said it was God’s will as she was meant to survive and to come back to Lithuania and tell the story.

These people weren’t even provided with clothing. They managed to cover themselves withpieces of fish netting and any kind of materials they could find such as cardboard. They had no source of heating for the yurts as there weren’t tries or anything else available for fuel.. Somehow she managed to survive.

After several years the KGB decided that, because she was a hard worker and a “smart girl”, they should have her trained to be a leader of the workers at her forced work camp. They took her to a school south of her camp.. She attended classes, ate, kept warm, and rested. Eventually she escaped (yes she was a very smart girl) and traveled west over a several year period and eventually got back to Lithuania.

Her story really got to me. To think of the inhumane treatment she received was so hard to understand. Of course it is true that thesewere very hard for the Russians also – they were starving but so much of how they treated these prisoners is really hard to understand.

We went into Kaunas for lunch. As we returned to our bus I got to see the Kaunas fire department responds to a fire a the “Economy Hotel” and watched them lay hose and enter and exit wearing turnouts and breathing apparatus.