I know what you’re thinking. You're thinking there is more to that story,
that maybe I should tell you about how I landed after jumping off the helicopter
and how I shook the hand of the President of Lithuania, Dalia Grabauskaite. I
might save that for another day. Tonight, its history and ghosts. Make sure you
leave the lights on.
After getting home from jump day, I was exhausted. I barely remember my head
touching the pillow. My body hurt all over. I blinked and it was morning.
For the first time since coming to Lithuania, the whole Troop got out of the
barracks. We headed to old town for a guided tour. Our bus stopped just outside
the old square and we all spilled onto the cobblestone streets like the bunch
of soldier we are. And there was our tour guide: a tall slender woman in her
50s that wore white parachute pants and a matching button shirt. Her English
was workable, although heavily accented. It took effort to listen, but it was
worth the extra work. It turns out, there are sorts of things about this part
of the world that I never knew. Surprise!
Imagine this:
You are born in a country that is no longer your own. The city that you live
in was once grand, but now it is mostly rubble. The shell of a burned out
church—its steeple a pile of loose bricks—is all that remains of the beacon
that shone like a lighthouse for sailors searching for shore.
Instead of pleasant homes and rolling
countryside, austere apartments, colored dead grey, mark every block.
Soldiers march through the streets wearing
soviet uniforms. If they catch you speaking your language, you might go to jail
or worse.
If you can’t speak Russian, you
have to work the underground market to get your food and water.
It was communism at its finest.
This was the life of our tour guide as child
living in occupied Lithuania.
Her name
was Anita.
If those circumstances were not enough, the occupying Russians set up a huge
statue of Vladimir Lenin in downtown Klaipeda.
It replaced a smaller monument that portrayed a little girl in a Sunday dress.
But Lithuania’s innocence was stolen by a
deadly master.
Lenin watched over the broken
town of Klaipeda with an ever present gaze.
The fact that this situation is nothing new for historic Lithuania is the
saddest part of all.
First it was the
Vikings, then the Teutonic Knights, then the Germans, then the Russians, then
the Nazis, and finally the Soviets. Each group laid claim to Klaipeda backed up
by the sword or the gun.
But Lenin would
fail, communism failed, and in 1992, Lithuania was the first Soviet Republic to
declare independence from Moscow.
Lithuania was free.
While we walked down the cobble-stone streets with Anita, you could almost
feel the torture that Lithuania has endured.
Anita, with her country, is recovering—as if from an abusive or dysfunctional
home.
She works in London and comes back
home to Klaipeda for the summer because she loves her homeland.
The economy still struggles with chains of a
terrible history.
“You can see the buildings on this street,” she said to me in her thickly
accented English, “When I was a child, all of these buildings were grey.
Tanks drove through the streets and bomb
shelters marked the street corners.”
Everyone from her generation speaks Russian. It was a matter of
survival.
Still, despite all efforts to destroy
the Lithuanian language, it survived. Proud of that survival, Anita beamed as
she continued.
“You see these nice buildings?
Everything is changing in Klaipeda. 10 years ago, these streets were
ugly and run down.
Whore houses were
turned into coffee shops and night clubs became industry.
The port was rebuilt and Klaipeda is becoming
a city again.”
You could feel the optimism
behind her words.
Then we reached an
empty lot marked with short hedges in a rectangular patter.
“In five years time,” Anita told us, “the
people of Klaipeda will reconstruct the old Lutheran church that stood as
symbol of Klaipeda for so long.
Sailors
will once again see the light of the steeple piercing through the coastal
clouds out into the Baltic Sea.”
She
wasn’t finished.
We walked from the old church site to a small square on the south side of
old town.
The buildings surrounding the
square were plain. Nothing special.
“When Lithuania declared independence,” Anita said, the Soviets left 4 tanks
to guard Lenin’s statue day and night.”
She wasn’t angry; she spoke her words precisely, keeping her emotions at
bay. “They wanted to provoke an incident, an excuse to reoccupy our country.”
It never happened.
In 1993 the tanks left, the last communist foothold in all of
Lithuania.
The citizens of Klaipeda let
out a long sigh of relief and headed for the square.
Down came Vladimir Lenin, with his ever
watching gaze; down come communism, never to rise again.
They dragged his statue into the square where
we stood, on the south side of old town, and left him lying down.
For an entire year, People from all over
Lithuania made the journey to Klaipeda, walked through old town to the square,
and looked at the lifeless statue of the communist supreme leader: Lenin lying
down.
*****
I almost forgot about the Ghost of Klaipeda!
The legend goes something like this: a long time ago in old town Klaipeda,
the soldiers and sailors of Lithuania were spending a day off in town.
Sometimes on the coast, the fog creeps up
onto the docks and into the streets of the city.
Back then, the lamps lining the streets would
only burn into the night so long before darkness had her way.
One soldier, walking near the harbor, noticed
something strange out in the water.
As
it rose up, it began to take shape—almost human but with no face or legs.
The figure slowly emerged out of the water and climbed up onto the docks,
water dripping from a dark cloak hanging about its strange shape.
The soldier was terrified. The thing began to
speak.
“Soon there will be famine in the land,” it said with a hiss. “Prepare,
prepare for the day when food will be scarce.”
Then, without further adieu, the ghost slipped off the dock and back
into the water. The soldier, horrified, ran to the church inside of town and
told the priest everything he had seen.
The priest believed him and the town was saved from a long famine the
actually did plague the land for a time.
Although the statue that now sits on the dock in Klaipeda is a little
creepy looking, they call him “The Good Ghost of Klaipeda” for saving the town.
So sleep well tonight knowing that ghosts, at least on this side of the Atlantic,
are as good as gold, and the real monster of Vladimir Lenin and communism has yet
to recover from his place lying on the ground.
