We went separate ways for the last leg of our overseas travel: Ella to Romania, Helen to Munich, and Doug and I to Riga, Latvia. Ella visited her good friend Daisa (Dye-eesa), who spent the previous school year at Cape Elizabeth as an exchange student. Two other friends of Ella’s–Nate Carpenter and Julia Yengel–were also there, making for an incredibly fun time for all. And they all returned with new tattoos…. Helen spent her last week in Munich, Germany with extended family of Doug’s: Caitlin, Nicholas, Jenny and David Jennings. She got to bond with Caitlin and family while enjoying the cool city of Munich, and hiking in the Austrian alps.
I wanted to visit Riga, Latvia to connect with my heritage. When my father Rolands was just 8 years old his father, mother and two younger sisters fled Riga, escaping on what turned out to be the last train leaving the station near their home, as the Russian Army blew up the track almost immediately afterwards. My grandfather had hidden a row boat along a shore so they could escape to Sweden; while sneaking into the boat at night a German soldier shone his flashlight on them. My grandfather and he locked eyes, the soldier turned away, and my family set out to sea. While on the Baltic Sea they were hit with a storm. Convinced they’d capsize they flew a white surrender flag when they saw a far off ship, praying it was Swedish. Their hearts sank when they saw it was in fact German but the ship sailed by, ignoring them, as it too was escaping from Russian rule. Thankfully the Swedish Coast Guard did rescue my family and brought them to Sweden, where they lived for the next two years. Once Sweden began returning immigrants to Soviet occupied Latvia two years later, several families bought a 64 foot boat and sailed for 46 days to Boston, where they have lived since.
I did feel a sense of connection in Latvia, where there were reminders of my grandparents in the clean, artistic style, stern faces, and language familiar to my ears. I also felt grief for my family forced to leave their country. I imagined how dangerous and threatening it would have been to leave one’s home with three children; my father Rolands was 8, Aunt Ilga 6, and Aunt Ediths an infant when my grandparents got into a row boat in the middle of the night fleeing to Sweden.
My grandmother Lucija had been married before my grandfather and had one daughter, who was living with the daughter’s father. My grandmother must have wondered if she would ever see that daughter or her family of origin again. She did not. When I was 22 and living for awhile with my grandparents in Winchester, Massachusetts my grandparents had an argument, after which my grandmother advised me to “never get married.” When I asked her how old she was when she married she answered, “19—the first time.” She was quiet and looking down, avoiding eye contact. I asked if she’d had any children from that marriage; she somberly answered “One daughter.” I wanted to ask more and now wish I had, but at the time I could see this was very painful for her and sensed she did not want to talk about it, so I let it go. About 20 years later, shortly before my grandfather died he confided in me he had “taken another man’s wife.” He told me he’d been a customer staying in the guest house run by my grandmother’s family, and he and my married grandmother had fallen in love. My grandmother was disowned by her family, but did correspond with her daughter for many years thereafter.
We found my family’s old apartment on Tomsana 15, in a line of simple cement buildings. I imagined my father, aunts and grandparents there 75 years ago. Did my father run on that hill and climb those trees? Did my Aunt Ilga jump rope while my grandmother had Aunt Edith in a pram? I could picture my grandfather’s purposeful walk returning home from a day’s work at his engineering job. Knowing I was walking on the same land they felt forced to flee, I wondered what would it have been like to secretly leave in the dark of night with one’s whole family, not knowing if you’d get caught and imprisoned, or killed. Not knowing if you’d navigate coastal mines and out across the Baltic Sea to Sweden without accident or capture by the enemy. That the potential for freedom outweighed so many risks speaks volumes.
My family made up 5 of the 29 immigrants who sailed for 46 days from Sweden to Boston on the the 64 foot boat Gundel in July of 1948. They were held in containment camps in Boston, Massachusetts for the summer until then Governor John F. Kennedy granted them refugee status, whereupon they lived with a Latvian host family until they could get on their own feet.
LIFE Magazine article from August 2, 1948
It is no wonder my grandfather was such a proud Latvian and proud American. After he and his family landed in America speaking no English and having no jobs, his wife kept the house running while he obtained his bachelor in science in chemical engineering from Northeastern University, bought a lovely new house in the desirable town of Winchester, Massachusetts, developed several patents for Gillette, helped raise three children, and built a cabin in a Latvian community in the New Hampshire woods.
I wasn’t able to locate any relatives in Latvia but we did connect with Sanita (a local who Doug’s cousin Topher’s cousin-in-law Marcus put us in contact with!). She was very gracious, meeting us one evening for dinner then the following day bringing us to a local park and beach, where I got to swim in the Baltic Sea. We were happy to have this time to talk with Sanita about culture and family. She is a single mother, as was her mother, and she told us Latvia is known as the country of single mothers. She suspects it is partly due to the high rate of alcoholism among males in Latvia, worsened by the oppressive Soviet rule that crushed the spirit and hope of many who sought solace in their Balsam liquor.
We left Riga to meet Helen at the Jennings’ home in Munich. Ella flew in from Romania, exhausted and happy and noticeably thinner from her 10 days there with friends. She reports that Romanians are indeed vampires–they don’t sleep at night and don’t need food. We four Strouts bonded with the Jennings then grabbed a few hours of sleep before catching the very early flight to the USofA!
Flying home: happy, sad, freaked…
Doug’s letter home, July 24, 2018:
“Hey Mom and Dad,
Guess where we are right now? Sitting by a gate at the Dusseldorf airport waiting for our JFK flight to board. It is just starting to sink in that we will be seeing you soon (like later today!) and this year of travel is coming to an end. Funny this only seemed to first hit me around 12 last night as I was getting into bed with Anna and realized we’d be next sleeping at the lake. Our Uber drive to the Munich airport at 4 this morning was also surreal, watching the quiet city roll past while thinking this epic journey is finally coming full circle. As I think I mentioned in my last email, I’m so pleased with the arc this trip has taken and how we wrapped up these last 10 days with our own separate adventures (A and I in Latvia, E in Romania and H in Munich) and now together we return home to the lake and you all before our final drive back to Robinhood Road.
I will let Ella and Helen tell you about their adventures when we see you. By all accounts their solo travels went smoothly and each had a great time, though Ella got sick with a cold and infected throat while visiting Daisa, deciding to take antibiotics while there which seems to have helped speed her recovery. Anna and I enjoyed visiting Riga, staying 6 nights at a lovely Airbnb apartment in a quiet neighborhood a 10 minute bus ride across the Daugava river to the Old Town heart of the city. It was good to finally see Anna’s ancestral homeland and easy to believe as most locals looked like they could have been related, their features reminding us of one family member or another. Each day we took a bus into the city, wandering the cobblestone streets and enjoying old European architecture, fountains and statues.
One evening we arranged to meet with a friend of Kerstin’s German cousin Marcus, a local woman named Sanita who met us by Riga’s Freedom Monument then took us to a nearby restaurant she liked serving a buffet of native Latvian dishes and big (1 liter) steins of beer. The next morning she and another friend, Dominic, drove us north 30 minutes along the Daugava to the Baltic Sea. There we spent the day walking on a quiet, sandy beach, staring out across calm water towards the east coast of Sweden and southern Finland. It was warm by Latvian standards during our stay with daytime temps getting up in the low 80’s and Anna swam in the cold, tannin stained water while I cheered her on from shore.
We spent much of our time that week imagining what it was like for Anna’s father and family in the years leading up to 1944 when they fled in a small boat to Sweden. One day we looked up her family’s old address, a large apartment building about a mile outside the city center. From what we learned visiting local museums, Germany invaded Latvia in 1941 when Anna’s father Rolands was about 6 years old. We watched some old footage taken by the Nazi’s showing their heavy artillery bombardment of the city from across the river. Later film showed troops marching in to mop up any remaining resistance in the mostly destroyed and burnt out buildings. Anna hasn’t learned much from her family as to how they coped in the aftermath of this destruction but from what we saw many Latvians were forced to join the German army and help in their relentless campaign to gather and kill the country’s substantial Jewish population. A beautiful, modern museum we visited, built on the site of a local couple’s home and woodshed, told the story of their success over several years hiding and helping about 60 Jews escape a city slum where they were kept for slave labor. It was explained that some Jews with certain skills were kept prisoner to join work gangs by day while most were simply taken into the woods and shot.
What an unimaginably grim time and place and no wonder Anna’s family fled, though a museum curator told us how lucky they must have been to get out of the country alive. Anna’s grandfather has shared a few details of the night they escaped when he, his wife and 3 children were spotted by a German soldier as they loaded their small rowboat on the dark shore. The man chose to ignore the family instead of raising the alarm or simply shooting them, evidence, our curator opined, that not all Nazis were zealots but simply men in a hellish situation doing what was needed to survive. She also said Anna’s family was lucky that night to successfully navigate the coastal gauntlet of mines and out to open sea, then lucky again the ship that found and picked them up was Swedish and not German. Anna’s grandfather supported his family in Sweden for 2 years while fixing up an old sailboat, then successfully sailed with several other refugee families to Providence, RI in 1946, shortly before Sweden made an agreement with then Soviet-occupied Latvia to return their Baltic migrants in order to maintain trade relations.
With this history, Riga isn’t simply another beautiful European city but also somehow dark, something we noticed in people we saw who were mostly unsmiling and not overly welcoming of strangers. Latvia is also poor and many once handsome buildings around Riga were in need of renovation or entirely derelict. Still, we visited during a fine summer stretch and downtown the streets were thick with cafes and restaurants, musicians and buskers, the many (mostly European and Chinese) tourists out snapping selfies and enjoying the warm light and timeless elegance of Old Town.
On Saturday we flew the couple of hours west to Munich and navigated the impressive rail system from the airport to cousin Jenny Jenning’s neighborhood just outside the city center. Jenny met us at the station and we walked 10 minutes through a quiet, semi-urban neighborhood to their lovely home of 16 years. Helen was out in the city with Caitlin that afternoon and Nicholas downstairs on the computer so David, Jenny and we first hung out, then took a train downtown for a fun night out on the town. Munich is another spectacular city, noticeably wealthier than Riga but with similar architecture and a hip, multicultural vibe. David and I also ran about 7 km’s around their neighborhood yesterday, mostly on pedestrian/bike trails in a green belt of trees, parks and athletic fields. Earlier we had driven to the airport for Ella’s arrival and last night we all sat down (Caitlin actually had to leave on a school trip to Vienna) to a festive Indian meal of David’s creation.
And so slipped by our final full day away from home and family. We’re all tucked into our middle row now on an 8 hour flight to New York where we’ll pick up a rental car for our last travel leg to the lake. I’m going to wrap this up and watch a movie or maybe try to sleep a bit, something we’ll all hopefully work on after only about 3 hours sleep last night. Still, I feel pretty good and excited when I think about arriving at the top of the stairs above Birdbox, then descending into the warmth and love of you two. Wow and hooray and see you so soon,
Doug”
Strout Family Year of Travel 