Today has been a very productive and satisfying day.  We went to the town, Sventoji,  where Michael lived at a young age.  We searched for the bridge where he said he fished as a child, and when things looked the way he pictured them to be, we started looking for the house.  He said the only one that might have been his home was a large yellow one a little ways from the bridge.  We stopped and talked to several people in the community, and finally one man remembered a house that belonged to Venclauskas’s many years ago, and mentioned the name of the next door neighbor who was the same neighbor Michael had known as a child.  And what do you know.  They took us back to the yellow house that Michael had felt a connection with earlier.  That is an amazing, but true story.  We have not as yet talked to the people who live there now, but we will try again tomorrow.  We then drove down by the sea and found the sand dunes.  Michael says his family had hidden behind the sand dunes, while his father watched for the German ships to pass.  Those of you the rest of the story, know that in spite of their careful planning, as they were midst their escape to Sweden, they were caught by the German soldiers. His father was sent to Siberia until he  finally escaped in the mid 70’s and made his way back to Lithuania where he died a month later.  Michael, his mother and brother were taken to a concentration camp in Germany and were finally rescued by Americans and taken to the states. 

We have had some wonderful Lithuanian food an look forward to exploring of this area tomorrow.