Nathan/Naess 2008 trip to Scandinavia, Lithuania, Poland, Paris & Berlin

Morten, Debbie, Sophy and Willy did a grand tour this summer (2008) to see the Scandinavian side of the family, to visit great-grandfather Meyer Jonah Nathan's shtetl (called Vilkija in Lithuanian, Vilki in Yiddish). Vilkija is a few miles from Kaunas (in Yiddish Kovno) on the Nieman river. In the summer, the area looks a lot like the land around Highway 90 from San Antonio to Houston. Which made me think: Maybe the immigration experience for Meyer Jonah (and his wife, Sarah Kleinshmidt) was a little less traumatic than I'd imagined. (Sarah was from nearby Wystitin ... Yiddish: Vishtinitz ... but we didn't visit because it's on the Russian border and I heard the Jewish cemetery is new and would likely not have our family's graves.)
Most Lithuanian Jewish cemeteries were destroyed by the Nazis, but oddly, Vilkija still has one. We had a Jewish guide, Simonas Davidavicius, one of Kaunas' 600 Jewish residents. He told us that what we saw might be a reconstructed cemetery, a recent amalgam of salvaged (previously uprooted and vandalized) Jewish gravestones from many surrounding shtetls. This could have happened because about 15 years ago, Lithuania mandated that every town in which Jews were killed by Nazis should create some sort of monument.
Hearing Simonas' historical caveat made our graveyard visit more eerie than it was, anyway. Simonas also reminded us that the lovely, brooding woods we saw surrounding the graves was likely not there when the dead were actually buried a century ago (if in fact, they HAD been buried there back then)...if it really was a Jewish graveyard, it likely would have been open fields.
The whole thing was inscrutable and sad. But the Nieman river, a mile or so away, cast another light. We have family stories about the Jewish men of our family working as barge boys, pulling boats loaded with lumber down the banks of the Nieman en route to Memel (Klaipedia). And there was the river! Not far from still surviving lumber mills. Amazing to see the family stories come to life.