Northford, CT
12 July 2024
About 18 years ago my daughter-in-law was in graduate school and as part of one of her international business courses, she and my son took a two-week trip to Russia and the Baltics. As soon as I heard Vilnius was one of their stops, I volunteered to get them information about my great grandparents, who I had been told were from Vilnius. It sounded so easy and was my entrance through the rabbit hole that has become a lengthy genealogical quest to understand who was related to who and how!
I’ve been able to solve some – not all – of the mysteries surrounding my father’s Fleischer family. For one thing, they were not from Vilna (as I had been told), but from Ziezmariai which is about an hour’s drive from the city. It is strange and a little funny that I tend to think of my great grandparents as “Josef and Rebecca”, rather than grandpa or bubbe, and to identify them so strongly with a place called Ziezmariai that it was only natural that I would want to visit in person.
It all started out as a short, solo trip to Lithuania, with JayWay Travel organizing the hotels and drivers/tours. However, it quickly became a 15-day “heritage trip” to share with two grown grandsons (19 and 21 years old) and grew to include Riga, Tallinn, Helsinki (because they were supposed to have great beer!), ending in Krakow with a visit to Auschwitz.
We began in Vilnius and spent our first morning on a walking tour of the Jewish quarter, including a visit to the Choral Synagogue. Built in 1903, it is the only synagogue in Vilnius and it is still in use. The building suffered damage under both the Nazis and the soviets and was restored in 2010 and once again became a synagogue. We were fortunate that we were able to explore the second-floor balcony, where we saw the last surviving matzoh machine in Vilnius (maybe all of Lithuania?).
My daughter-in-law is not Jewish so, neither are my grandsons. They are, however, intensely curious about their heritage and were fascinated by the sites in Vilnius, including the statue or the famous Litvak, Leonard Cohen. They were fascinated by the displays in the small holocaust museum, including the plaque and statue honoring Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese diplomat who issued thousands of visas to help Jews escape. Often referred to as the Japanese Schindler, his efforts were heroic and helped me convince the boys that even in the midst of madness, there were some good people who tried to help.
We spent the next day in Ziezmariai and Babtai, homes of Josef and Rebecca respectively. We visited the restored synagogue in Ziezmariai, which functions more as a memorial and, while we were there, a site for local artisans to display their work.
While we drove to Ziezmariai, our guide decided to teach my oldest grandson how to read the Hebrew alphabet. He had taken several years of Arabic in high school and saw similarities between the two and by the time we got to the cemetery, he was able to read off the letters for her to write down and then read the names or information from the stones. This is the same grandson who had decided before we left the U.S. that in Vilnius he wanted to get a tattoo on his wrist – and that tattoo turned out to be the chai.
It was the cemetery that really spoke to the boys about a long-gone past when Ziezmariai was a thriving Jewish shtetl. The cemetery is nearly covered with field grasses now, most of the stones dislodged and lying in the grass or simply removed years ago to build house foundations or pave roadbeds. The few stones that are still upright are worn and most are not very legible. I know for a fact that two of Josef’s young siblings were buried there and I suspect that both of his parents were buried there as well, but there is no way to locate their graves so I left a few white pebbles that I brought from home near the maceva at the entrance to the cemetery and said a silent prayer.
From Zezmariai we drove to Babtai, the shtetl where my great grandmother was living at the time she and Josef married. The cemetery there no longer exists. Some of the stones have been moved to a small, commemorative plot. We left pebbles there as well.
On the way back to Vilnius we stopped to see the Kaunas Choraline Synagogue, built in 1872 and one of two active synagogues in the city. The outside was covered with scaffolding for ongoing repairs so I didn’t take any photos, but there are good photos on Wikipedia. The interior is rich and beautiful and even though I know there have been antisemitic incidents in recent years, I was still pleased that this is an active congregation.
After four days in Vilnius, we were driven to Riga and got to see huge expanses of the countryside in both Lithuania and Latvia – just beautiful! We never saw any roadside litter and the roads are not as cluttered with signage as we are used to here in the states. I mean, how many signs does a driver really need to tell them there is a curve ahead? Electric lines tend to be set far back from the edges of the road and we barely noticed them. It was a beautiful drive!
It turned out that our hotel in Riga was literally a few hundred feet from the Peitav Synagogue, the only synagogue to have survived WWII. Built in 1905 and used as a warehouse by the Nazis, it was restored in 2009 and is currently an active orthodox schul.
There were lots of visitors the day we were there.
After Riga, we traveled on to Tallinn and Helsinki and finally to Krakow. I was unprepared for what a beautiful city Krakow is!! The old town is just gorgeous and the Jewish Quarter was hopping with restaurants and tourists. We arrived at the end of the annual Jewish Festival and although we tried to buy tickets for the synagogue tour, never got a response to my emails and did not manage to see more than the outside of one schul.
We did, however, have a private walking tour through the ghetto and the museum at Schindler’s factory and learned a lot about the German invasion of Poland from both the Polish and the Jewish points of view. The next day, we visited Auschwitz and Birkenau. Both of the boys said it was one of the hardest things they have ever done but were happy and proud that they had been to the camps. The younger boy kept asking me how it could have happened, how human beings could treat other human beings so savagely and I, like any sane person, could not give him an acceptable answer. We took just a few photos, but photos rally do not begin to describe what the experience of being there is really like. I left the last smooth, white pebbles beside the ruins of the crematorium at Birkenau and said another prayer that we never experience such hatred and depravity again. It will require a word-wide effort to stop the haters, wherever they are and whoever they hate.
Babtai
Kaunas
RIGA
Vilnius
Ziezmariai
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