Vaiva's family background

For those who are unfamiliar with Vaiva's family, here's a very short summary. The context is needed for the letters to make sense.

Vaiva's father, Juozas Vebra, was an army colonel in Lithuania between the wars, running a chemical engineering lab in Kaunas. (He was the science advisor during the building of the lab, the architect was Landsbergis, whose son would, fifty years later, help lead the drive for Lithuanian independence. Small world.) Juozas was married with two sons and a daughter.

He was arrested by the Nazis for his anti-Nazi activity, though he never was told specifically what his crime was. (He was, needless to say, anti-Nazi.) Sentenced to die, he was liberated by the Allies just in time, days before the sentence was to be carried out.

By this time, waves of Lithuanians had left their homeland, fleeing the invading Russians. Juozas' family did not leave, however. They stayed behind, but he could not return to them, because he faced the certainty of death or deportation at the hands of the communists.

Accordingly, he went to a displaced persons camp, I believe in Germany, where he found the Zidonis family, whom I believe he had known before the war as well. He and Genevieve joined forces then, but I'm not certain when they married. They traveled together and lived in France for a while, later they emigrated to the U.S. and settled in New Haven.

Vaiva was born in 1954.

Although he could not go back, Jouzas did not abandon his first family. He sent packages of stuff to them for years--canned goods, clothing, coffee, things that would be hard to obtain or that they could use for trade. This amounted to many tens of thousands of dollars worth of material support over the years. I imagine that in the 1950s he hoped to return one day, but this hope must have dimmed over the years.

Vaiva participated, accompanying her father when he went to arrange for another package. (I went along once also.) Therefore, she considered his first family to be her own family, she considered her half-siblings to be her own brothers and sister, though she had never met them, didn't know if she would ever be able to meet them. What a strange circumstance for growing up.

Against this backdrop, Vaiva's first visit to Lithuania, her first chance to meet the rest of her family, must have been as terrifying as it was potentially exhilarating.