The trip to Kybartai

Thursday we drove the farthest we'd been to date. My father wished to visit the town on the old Lithuanian/German border that he'd lived at till he was 6 years old - Kybartai. His father worked as a customs expiditer, and their third story apartment was in a building that housed a bank next to the river and railroad that marked the border with the Germans. That land, formerly Prussia now controlled by the Russians, still is a border town but with the lack of any meaningful amount of cross-border trade it is more akin to one of the small villages we drove through on the way to Alytus yesterday.

On this trip Eileen & Daniel joined us, and I really have to give them credit for daring to do so. The drive was 3 hours there and two and a half back. Quite a long drive to see a small speck on the map. Daniel was great, he slept half of the way and never once threw a tantrum. Eileen kept the box of Cheerios next to her up front and we munched on them the entire way and back.

The building my father grew up in was gone (hey, who needs banks in the workers paradise?), but the communists built a larger apartment building on the foundation. We didn't know this when we got there because the layout had been changed slightly. My father did knew the area however, he knew which street the house was one but couldn't nail down which of the two or three buildings it was. As it turned out we asked a lady walking the street who knew of a much older women who had lived nearby her entire life. My father and I walked over to her apartment and sure enough she was home. Dad introduced himself and asked where the 'Ukio Bankas' (lit. Commerce Bank) was. A great big smile lit up on her face as she said 'Ukio Bankas!' and pointed out the window to the building next door, No. #24.

Dad walked the perimeter of the building and that's when we recongized that the apartment building had been built on top of the old foundation. He then pointed out to me where his grandfather lived and where the cross-border traffic (consisting back then of geese, mainly) took place. We then drove a few blocks and he showed us where the synagogue used to be. The communists had raised what was left after the Germans, and the area was left comepletely bare. Nothing but a small puddle in a dusty patch of land the size of my building's parking lot. I was surprised they never built something over it given that it was a stone's throw from the main road / highway. You would of never known that the main synagogue occupied this land. I wondered if, in a hundred years, will anyone remember?