Well, just about everything that could go wrong did. My detailed agenda, weeks in the planning, was blown out of the water – but a few, unexpected events went just right, as you’ll see.

On Thursday, July 10, Sophie Davidas, the great-granddaughter of David Davidov, her friend Simon, and I arrived in Skuodas in our rented car. The GPS that led us around in circles for 10 minutes on our arrival was, as it turns out, an omen of things to come. We arrived at the Skuodas Museum just before the event we’d planned to attend, and were ushered us into a small lecture hall with seating for about 30. I’d been warned that the attendance would be small: in fact, about 28 of those 30 seats were taken up by the speakers, performers, and choir.

 

 

The program consisted of a few short lectures, a skit, and the choir’s performance, all in Lithuanian and incomprehensible to us guests, who were entertained nonetheless.

After the event, the performers/audience quickly scattered, and Sophie, Simon, and I, somewhat bemused, left the hall. In the foyer, we found a pleasant surprise: a small display featuring photos and names of a few of Skuodas’s Jewish citizens and descendants of the Mines, Davidov, and Bernstein families.

Outside the museum, Paul, the young filmmaker we had arranged to meet, and his friend Jakobus were waiting. The five of us went to the Vespera restaurant in the town square – aside from the two hotels and a teen pizza hangout, the only restaurant in town – for coffee and a discussion of Paul’s film project on Holocaust memorialization in Lithuania.

Sophie, Simon, and I had lots of ideas and advice – maybe too many, because after our coffee, the two young filmmakers bade us a friendly farewell, with promises to meet the next day, and drove off, never to be seen (by us, at least) again.

Unfortunately for me, something had come up for Sophie and Simon, and they had to make last-minute plans to leave Skuodas the next morning, not the day after as originally planned. So we drove to the Jewish cemetery, which they especially wanted to visit, where we had arranged to meet Živilė, a gymnasium (high school) student I’d met the previous year. She was there with her parents, Nijolė and Mindaugas, who had been keen to spend some time with us. Mindaugas drove us to the memorial in the centre of town, where we were touched to find some small stones inscribed with Jewish names, presumably left by students on the Holocaust memorial day the previous September. 

We also visited the memorial just south of Skuodas, at the village of Kulai I. Nijolė, who works at the city hall, told us the memorial’s ironwork was due to be painted; what colour did we recommend? We said repainting the now-rusted yellow was fine.

Then follows a rather turbulent time I don’t remember very well. I hadn’t slept well since arriving in Europe a week earlier; there was a heatwave and a few days ago I’d had heatstroke; I was concerned about our Shabbes dinner plans, which would be thrown off by Sophie and Simon’s early departure; and I hadn’t checked into my hotel in Skuodas yet, leaving me with a rootless, insecure feeling.

Pleased to be hitting it off with Živilė and her parents, though, and still up for a bit of adventure, Sophie, Simon, and I were whisked off to the rock museum in Mosedis, apparently a must-see place for those visiting the Skuodas region. While I initially had my doubts, I must admit it is a stunningly beautiful place: the phrase “rock museum” doesn’t do justice to this botanical nature-garden.

 

 

 

 

 

By the time we’d finished exploring, it was past 10:00 and we were hungry. The restaurant in Skuodas was closed. The restaurant in Mosedis was closed. Mindaugas took charge – a former soldier, he’s that kind of guy. We drove an hour to Palanga for dinner, after which Mindaugas saw Sophie and Simon settled into a hotel (they were flying out the next morning, or rather the same morning, as it was now past midnight) and drove me and my baggage – I still hadn’t checked into my hotel! – back to Skuodas, making phone arrangements en route for me to let myself in when we got there. Yes, our ancestral town Skuodas is now firmly established in the digital age!

By the time we got back to Skuodas, around 1:30 am, I was practically catatonic. Živilė and her parents drove me to my hotel, found the key in its hiding place, walked me and my suitcase upstairs, made sure the room was OK, and said goodnight. Despite my exhaustion, I felt very well taken care of….until I unpacked my computer to find a message from my daughter Sarah, who was due to arrive in Skuodas around noon. She’d been delayed in the Frankfurt airport because of bad weather, which meant I’d be on my own all the next day. And thus ended the first day.

In the morning, Živilė phoned me. Would I like to meet the mayor? Yes, I certainly would! She picked me up at the hotel and walked me the short distance to the city hall (according to Živilė, on the site of the former Kontinent shoe factory). We then had an informal, cordial meeting with the mayor, Stasys Vainoras, who, in pretty good English, spoke about present-day relationships between Skuodas citizens and Jews; he’d had Jewish neighbours growing up in Skuodas, and last year, two rabbis, one from Vilnius and the other from Israel, had been in the town visiting the Holocaust memorials. I also briefly met Bronislavas Stasiulis, the city director, who was responsible for organizing the memorials. Mr. Stasiulis doesn’t speak English, but with Živilė translating, I thanked him for his work on our behalf. It was a good meeting, I think, and hopefully will pave the way for future meetings on topics that might be a bit more controversial.

After our meeting at city hall, Živilė and I were off to another meeting she had set up for me, this one with an old family friend who remembered the prewar Jewish community.

We visited for about an hour, with Živilė providing a summary translation. I taped the interview and will post the transcription on this site when it’s done.

 

 

 

The celebratory Shabbes dinner planned for that night had sadly dwindled from ten to two people: Živilė and myself. It obviously wasn’t meant to be! Fortunately, Živilė’s parents were free that evening to dine with us, and afterwards they invited me home for coffee and dessert. They live on the edge of town in a spanking-new, super-modern home with geothermal power – who would expect to find such a house in our ancestral town? – and I ponder on the fact that today’s Skuodas, even if the Holocaust had never happened, would be unrecognizable to my father, who was born and raised there.

The next morning I took myself for a walk. Strolling from my hotel towards the town centre, I passed the former cinema, now a youth club;

 

 

 

 

the Catholic church and the site of my family’s shoe factory;

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

and crossed the bridge over the Bartuva River where Shkuders used to bathe and present-day Skuodas citizens still do. Is this the forested place once known as the Vilke Birzhe (“Forest of the Wolf”) described by Leon Bernstein in his memoir?

 

On the east side of the river, Laisves street begins: the former Lange Gas or “Jewish Street.” I walked the length of Laisves taking pictures of the old, once-Jewish houses, some in sad disrepair and others well-maintained.

By the time I got back to my hotel, my daughter Sarah had arrived, and a few hours later, we continued our tour, with me playing tour guide this time. We retraced my walk of the morning and also visited the Jewish cemetery and Skuodas’s two Holocaust memorials.

Continuing our exploration, we came across Skuodas’s train station, now disused.

 

 

 

 

 

 

This station was the main transport hub for the town in the interwar years. Here Ber and Ephraim Segal transported passengers by coach and bus between the station and the town centre. My mother’s mother Paula would have walked down these steps  to marry her second husband in Shkud in 1936, and my father would have walked up them, leaving Shkud to settle in Kaunas around the same time.

 

 

 

There was one last place to visit: the Holocaust monument at Alka Hill, which I have read about in Hana Shaf-Brener’s book and other sources, but never visited. Živilė told us Alka Hill was south of Skuodas, on the outskirts of Salantai. Our GPS, into which we had entered coordinates we found online, gave a different location. We went to both.

Živilė’s Alka Hill turned out to be a suburb. If there is a Holocaust memorial there, it was not to be found, at least by us. The coordinates took us to a different Alka Hill,

which at first looked promising, but turned out to have a church and crosses on top and a cowfield below – again, not what we were looking for. It turns out that “Alka Hill” (“Alkos Kalnas” in Lithuanian) means “Sacred Hill” and there are a number of them. But I’ll keep looking, and report on any positive results. If you have any idea where the Alka Hill Holocaust memorial is, please let me know!

That wraps up this year’s visit to Skuodas. My next visit, if things work out, will be to address students and other local residents on Holocaust Memorial Day, September 23, 2015. We’ll see what the future brings.

I knew I had to be better prepared for my second trip to Skuodas than I was for my first, but I had no idea how to go about it. Planning accommodations and Jewish history tours in the other family hometowns I wanted to visit, Riga, Liepaja, and Kaunas, was easy, as I have a cousin in Latvia who speaks English and is well-connected with the local Jewish community, and the hotels in the larger centres have informative websites and online booking. Skuodas was a different matter. In the year since my first visit in 2007, I’d managed to find some general information about the town online, but still had no “in.” Emails I sent to the city administration were not answered, probably due to the language barrier.

One of my Google searches turned up an online English-language resume of a former Skuodas resident. I emailed her, and she kindly put me in touch with an English-speaking friend of hers who lived in another town but visited her parents in Skuodas regularly. Skaidre, the friend, was more than willing to help. She set up an appointment with me to meet one of the coordinators of the Skuodas Museum, Joana Sleiniene, and a retired teacher and translator, Roma Zemaitiene.

So, on a hot July morning, my travelling companion and I left Liepaja in our rented car, and – avoiding the back roads this time – arrived at the Skuodas Museum to find Joana, a tall, solid-looking woman a few years older than I, and Roma, smaller and grey-haired, waiting for us.

After warm greetings – they really did seem delighted to see us – we were invited into Joana’s office, where we were given coffee – boiling water poured into cups over ground beans. (There is a certain knack to drinking this coffee, which I don’t have, and I spent the next fifteen minutes furtively scraping bits from between my teeth.)

Joana showed me a photocopy of a 1939 Skuodas phonebook which stated that a certain M. Mines once operated a shoemaking business, Konkurencia, at 2 Laisves Street. My father, Sender Mines, had also been a shoemaker – “the uppers, not the soles” – he was adamant about that – and so this M. Mines was almost certainly a relation. (Later I found out he was my father’s cousin Michal Mines, who operated the workshop and store with his father Yosel.)

Then we set off for the tour Joana had planned for us. Just outside the museum, we stopped for a photo op. “Make us famous,” Roma joked, and I promised I’d try. 

Still on the museum’s doorstep, Joana pointed out a modest, blue-painted house across the street.

This was one of the few remaining Jewish houses on Laisves Street, once home to a largely Jewish population.

A few minutes’ drive away, we pulled up at another surviving Jewish house, this one belonging to the Mayer family.

[I thought at the time it was my grandfather Mayer Mines’s house, and was tremendously excited until I realized my mistake.] This is one of the only Jewish houses in the area to have survived the town centre’s destruction in WWII, and it is still in use. The well from which the Mayer family drew water is still in the courtyard.

Then we drove to the monuments. First, the Jewish cemetery, which was destroyed by the Soviets after World War II, the tombstones carted away for various building projects. All that remains is a flat cement base, shaped like a Star of David, into which have been set a few largish upright chunks, fragments of tombstones still bearing their Hebrew lettering. I had brought a few pebbles from home, and I placed one on the monument, picking up a few pebbles to put on my father’s grave at home. Aside from the missing tombstones, the cemetery is well-tended: grass cut, litter-free, peaceful. A tall standing stone by the entrance identifies the place in Yiddish letters.

A stork nests in a tall tree overlooking the empty field.

Next we drove to Kulai I, the site of the Nazi massacre of most of the Jewish men of Shkud, an abandoned gravel quarry a few miles out of town. [At the time, I didn’t know about Alka Hill, where most of the women and children were murdered, which I plan to visit next time I’m in Skuodas.] Now, the former murder site is a peaceful place in the sun, guarded with trees, freckled with Queen Anne’s Lace and other wildflowers, overlooking a small blue lake with black and white cattle grazing nearby.

The monument lies at the end of the road. It features a large rock with a flat, polished face, set upright on a concrete base. The rock has been split in two, like the tablets of the Ten Commandments, its two halves joined by a Star of David fashioned of thin metal strips. On each tablet is an inscription, one in Lithuanian, one in Yiddish, honouring the 800 Jewish citizens of Shkud, some of whom were my relatives, who were killed by gunfire at that place. “The wound,” it reads, “will never be healed.” (“The words are quite, quite true,” Roma added.) The site is surrounded by a low metal fence inset with yellow-painted Stars of David. I hesitated for a few moments to step over the fence and approach the monument, but then I reasoned it’s my own people’s place. I stepped over the fence. I placed a few pebbles from home at the base of the monument. I took a few away with me, for my father’s grave.

Then Joana, through Roma, told us a story. She was, she said, in the 8^th form. It was 1963. There was a ceremony organized by the municipality. All the bodies from Kulai were put into coffins and brought into town. There was a procession with flowers at the head, then the coffins carried by the people of Skuodas, then some more of the people of Skuodas on foot. Schoolchildren sang songs. Some of them had even learned some Jewish songs and poems. In those days several Jews still lived in Skuodas, and other Jews, relatives and other people, had been invited, and they also participated in the procession. They brought all the bodies into town and buried them there.

“Many non-Jewish Lithuanians helped the Nazis,” Roma added. “We know their names. They were common people. The people who lived in the town hated them. But there were several who helped. They wanted to take over the wealth of the Jews, their property. Any nation has such people. They were not many, but they helped the Nazi armies.”

We drove back to the town, passing on the way the site of the Old Synagogue, now a potato field. 

In the town centre near the museum, behind the tidy rows of houses and their vegetable gardens, at the end of an alleyway of privet hedge, and next to the Shaul Hall, where Jews and other prisoners were held and tortured before execution, lies the final resting place of the Jews who were massacred in Shkud and Kulai.

The monument is a square cube of reddish granite, polished to a high gloss. One corner is set into a flat, circular concrete-and-stone base. It is surrounded by six smaller triangular blocks. I suspect that, viewed from above, the cube and triangles would form a Star of David. In the circular base of the monument are set numerous shards and fragments. Joana said they were the remains of tombstones from the destroyed Jewish cemetery. One side of the granite cube contains lettering. The words are Lithuanian, but the letters, square and blocky, with fat pointed serifs, suggest Hebrew. Roma translated: “To commemorate Skuodas Jews – children, women, and men – and also those of other nationalities who were killed by Nazis and their collaborators in 1941.”  I stood for a long time. A thin grey cat sauntered across the monument’s base. I left a pebble. I took another.

Back in the museum, I felt overcome, bombarded with emotional overload. We had been in Skuodas three hours, and I felt I needed three or four days to digest everything. Joana showed me some cases displaying items manufactured by Skuodas Jews, and I dutifully snapped a few photos, but by that point I was taking in very little. It was only a few hours ago, drafting this blog, that I realized one photo featured postcards made in the printshop belonging to the Davidov family. That is a name I now recognize as one of the prominent families of Shkud.

Before we left, I gave Joana a couple of photos of my father and his family in Shkud for the museum archive. On my next visit, I found them prominently displayed in a case devoted to the history of Jewish Skuodas. But that’s another story.

 

Welcome to the Shtetl Shkud blog. My plan is to use this blog to share our stories, memories, and thoughts about Shkud, our families in Shkud, and present-day Lithuania and Skuodas.

My relationship with Shkud began when I was a kid, when I first saw my dad’s Yizkor book, and in it, a photo of him as a young man with his football team.

To me, at the time, the book was like a puzzle with no entranceway: a language I couldn’t read, black-and-white photos of people I couldn’t identify, and a town “behind the Iron Curtain” no one could get to. My parents, both survivors (my mom, a Canadian citizen by birth, grew up in Liepaja, Latvia – but that’s another story) told me that all Jewish documents and records had been destroyed in the Holocaust, and that, as I thought, was that.

Fast forward … my dad died in 1982. Lithuanian independence and the Internet arrived about a decade later, but it wasn’t until 2007 that my brother and I had the brilliant idea to find our “roots” in Eastern Europe. Our mom’s hometown, Liepaja, Latvia, was our main port of call, since my mom still had a cousin there, and also, we’d been able to discover quite a bit about Liepaja online. But very little information about Skuodas was available to us – we were thrilled just to be able to find it on a map, a half-hour drive from Liepaja, just across the Latvia-Lithuania border.

Our first attempt, a “shortcut” across farmland on secondary roads, proved unsuccessful. After a brief encounter with a couple of Latvian backwoodsmen, neither of whom could interpret our English, our handwaving or, apparently, our map, we found ourselves on an ever-narrowing lane which eventually devolved to a rutted track through the underbrush, then ended in a swamp.

Back in Liepaja, we recovered over drinks in our hotel and tried again. This time, we got it right, and after a 10-minute wait at the then-manned border station just north of Skuodas where our passports were checked (paranoically, I half-expected a Lithuanian version of “Jews! Out of the car!” but of course nothing happened), we were in Skuodas.

We had no idea what to expect. For all my online research, I’d found very little information, and some of that obviously wrong (“Its territory covers 911 square meters.”). The night before, raking over our memories of the bits and pieces our parents had told us about the place, I’d observed to my brother, “no matter what we expect, for sure it’ll be completely different,” and it was.

For one thing, my mom used to tease my dad about Skuodas’s wooden sidewalks.

For another, she used to tease him about the goats eating the thatched roofs.

 

 

What we did find was a quiet town of tree-lined streets, modestly prosperous-looking houses and public buildings, a surprisingly modern town centre that could have been anywhere in North America (“with a bank machine! and a supermarket!” we marvelled), and a populace enthusiastically attending that evening’s pop concert in a beautiful wooded riverside park.

I guess what really struck us was how ordinary the place was, and the gap of decades and cultures between the Skuodas of today and that of our parents’ and grandparents’ generation. We drove around for a while, trying to feel a connection, to put ourselves and our father into the place, and then we went back to Liepaja.

The next summer, I returned to Skuodas. In the meantime, I’d managed to find out a little more about the town and its history, though there still wasn’t much information available. Even better, I’d made online contact with a resident who very kindly arranged for me to meet Joana Sleiniene, a director of the Skuodas Museum. So, on a hot morning in July, 2008, Gene (my travelling companion) and I left Liepaja and headed to our appointment in Skuodas.

To be continued!