God Save Texas

Way, way, way back in the day, I would have never thought that I would be living Texas. (There are a lot of things that I wound up doing that have been inconceivable way back when.) But here I am…in Texas. And today marks my sixteenth anniversary of having set foot on Texas soil.

My introduction to Texas was through Lubbock, where I would wind up living for the next five years. The locals called it “Dirt City,” for the frequent dust storms it had, which also had it taking first place in the America’s Toughest Weather City in 2013, edging out Fairbanks, Alaska.

Driving cross country to Lubbock was an unforgettable experience, as well as my introduction to the vastness of Texas. My ears popped as my small Scion tC coupe climbed up the Caprock Escarpment to a vast expanse of flatness at 3202 feet above sea level. And there was Lubbock, smack dab in the middle of the Llano Estacado (Staked Plains).

Lubbock was pretty much in the middle of nowhere. The area was so desolate that the first thing that popped up in my head, while crossing this vast terrain, that there was no shortage of places to hide a dead body. But there was a certain beauty in this desolation. Its average of 264 sunny days a year (higher than the national average of 205 days) and semi-arid climate did much to improve my mood, and was a greatly welcomed change from the constantly dreary overcast and precipitous days in the small southeastern New England coastal town.

There was something about Lubbock that grew on me, and that I still find endearing. Lubbock was my first introduction to Texas and Texan culture. It was a completely alien and refreshing experience from the New England Yankee culture.  Cowboy hats and cowboy boots were actually normal daily attire and not just reserved for costume events. The people were the friendliest and most polite I’ve ever encountered. Absolute strangers went out of their way to help us. 

But as endearing and fascinating this new land was, I knew enough to keep my mouth shut about certain things, such as my having voted for Obama. Unlike largely liberal New England, Texas is conservative in both politics and religion. While the larger cities may have considerably more left leaning populations, the overly abundant rural areas are most definitely red. That is especially obvious when I make my annual pilgrimage from Houston to Austin.

Given the current political and social climate, this is a huge area of concern, especially since this is my adopted state. And despite the sociopaths and psychopaths in charge, and the extremely parochial and easily brainwashed sheep who keep re-electing them, there is actually a lot to love about Texas. 

When I hear left leaning folks saying, “I could never live in Texas,” I see it as something more than just merely stating an opinion. It’s a totally self-centered statement shows insensitivity towards those who don’t have the resources to escape the chaos, oppression, and hostility unleashed against women, people of color, the poor, Muslims, Asians, the educated, etc  — against basically anyone who is not a male Christian Nationalist Fascist. And it breaks my heart when these people also refers to Texas as “Texass.”

And there are plenty of folks who don’t want to leave Texas, like Lawrence Wright, the author of God Save Texas - A Journey into the Soul of the Lone Star State. Wright is a Texas native who has made his home in Austin. He is someone who loves the Lone Star state, but is also deeply concerned about the direction in which it is heading.

Eyes are on Texas. According to the  book’s blurb, “Texas looks a lot like the America that Donald Trump wants to create.” Truer words could not have been written. Even though the cities are largely blue and diverse, Texas is pretty much red, with the vast majority of its conservative voters coming from the rural areas, which are isolated and which make up the bulk of this very huge state.

Wright writes, “Because Texas is a part of almost everything in modern America — the South, the West, the Plains, Hispanic and immigrant communities, the border, the divide between the rural areas and the cities — what happens here tends to disproportionately affect the rest of the nation.”

There is a lot to be concerned about, especially in these very surreal times and the political theater of the absurd that is currently playing. And I’m very concerned about the direction this state, as well as this country, is careening towards.

But at the same time, not only is America my adopted country, Texas is my adopted state. And in the words of Maddie Quimper, a character in James Michener’s Texas, “I like it here.”

Separation and Fear — Lithuanian Couple Hope History Doesn’t Repeat Itself in Their Homeland

(Victor and Irene Ancikas — Vytautas and Irena Ančikas — were my uncle and aunt. This story was transcribed from a newspaper article that was part of their estate.)

Victor and Irene Ancikas have hoped for independence in Lithuania since they left their country as teen-agers during World War II.

In Germany; England; Canada; Providence, R.I.; and — since 13 years ago — Kernersville, they have continued to talk and read about Lithuania. They read a weekly Lithuanian paper, Lights of Homeland, printed in Lithuanian in Toronto.

After the Soviet crackdown in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, last month, a front-page photo in Lights of Homeland showed a tank pressing against a wall of people.

“The tank is rolling over a man. You can see his feet,” Ancikas said, pointing to a pair of boots in the corner of the blurred photo.

Mrs. Ancikas said: “Nobody had any weapons. They thought they could stop them (the Soviet soldiers)…but they just went over the people, you can see it.”

Ancikas translated the cutline under the photo, “‘At Vilnius, near Lithuanian radio and television stations, people without any hope are trying to hold back a tank….’ And underneath you can see a human being.

“Nobel Peace Prize-winner, Mr. Gorbachev, sending his tanks to kill peace. For that he got Nobel Peace Prize,” he said.

The crackdown has raised the specter of two occupations by Stalinist Russia and by Nazi Germany in Lithuania and years in Germany as refugees — times that the Ancikases survived long before they met.

In a recent interview, Mrs. Ancikas described her memories of the first Soviet occupation of Lithuania in 1940.

“From a certain point, we started going to bed all dressed up,” she said. “We were afraid because of people taken to Siberia. That’s what I remember. I asked my mother, ‘Why do we have to get dressed up to go to bed?’”

Ancikas said: “Because they didn’t give you any time.”

“Not at all,” Mrs. Ancikas said. “They come in at night. If you’re in your nightgown, you go in the nightgown. They just take you in the trains, in the cattle cars….”

“No trials. No trials,” Ancikas said.

“No nothing,” she said.

“No trials of any kind,” he said. “They just arrest you….”

“A family with the babies and everything,” she said. “And then they have no food. They have to wait in these trains, eight days or 12 days until…they are filled up and then they go to Siberia….

“When the war started with Germany, when the Germans came…we were glad,” Mrs. Ancikas said.

“We thought — we were confused — that they were going to help us. To liberate us,” Ancikas said.

“Saviors — liberate us — like they were saviors,” she said.

“Instead we were occupied by Germany, and they imposed their own strict rule. You know what they did…,” he said.

Many families were separated during the occupations. Ancikas had lived with his family in Kaunas, Lithuania. “My family was completely taken apart,” he said.

“MY BROTHER WAS arrested and sent to a concentration camp. My uncle got killed. My cousin got killed…. When the war was ending, and the Communists were advancing in Lithuania again, there were a lot of disruptions. People were taken and forcibly removed to Germany. Some of the people ran on their own…. I got separated from my family…. We were in refugee camps until the war ended…. My parents unfortunately ended up in that part of Germany which was occupied by the Soviet Union.”

Ancikas was 19 then. He didn’t see his family again until 1971. His father died about six years before that.

Mrs. Ancikas’ family was more fortunate. They all survived.

The family still tells the story of the German army’s arrival in 1941 in Vilkaviskis, where she lived just over a border from Germany.

“My mother and sister have repeated it so many times that I know exactly what happened,” she said. “Early in the night, it was in June…the windows were open, and my mother heard like a thunder at 3:00 in the morning.

“That’s what she thought it was, thunder. And the windows were open so she woke up, and she was going to close all the windows so that the rain would not come inside.

“THEN SHE WENT to the window that was facing Germany to close that window, and it happened that the guns started shooting. And she saw it, because she saw, when she was a little girl, the first world war. She knew this was a war, and she woke everybody up, and that’s when we were informed that….”

Ancikas said: “That’s when our misery began.”

“Yes. That the Germans, that this war was coming,” she said. “There were so many Russian soldiers in that town where I lived. They were all over, just with their briefs, running without ammunitions or anything.”

“Germany started that war,” he said.

“Without any warning or anything,” she said. 

“Just rolled in. Those guys were still sleeping,” he said.

“Sleeping. Running,” she said. “(A priest) found in this forest…about 18 people, two teachers, a couple of priests and some other professions.

“They were all tied to the trees, and they were taking films, the Communists were taking films…. They were cutting like belts from their flesh. They were naked — torturing, they were cutting the first — and there were screams and everything. Then the priest, he was at his parents, so he went to investigate what was happening, and that’s when he was tortured, too.”

Ancikas said, “Well anyway, we can summarize that: There were a lot of atrocities….”

Mrs. Ancikas said: “I also remember going to a church on a Sunday morning, and there was a father and a son burned to death right in front of the church. That I remember.”

Ancikas said: “People over here don’t really know what it is like…. We had an awful lot of resistance in Lithuania against the Nazis during German occupation. So if a resistance person killed a German, there were reprisals against them the next day. I remember.

“WE KNOW ONE INSTANCE in kind of a rural area — it was kind of a village — and the German convoys were going on the highway, and people shot them up, and they killed some of them.

“So the next day, the Nazis sent two battalions of their army to that particular village, and they took every man and woman out of the village, and they herded them all into a barn, and they set the barn on fire. Anybody who tried to run out of the barn was shot.”

Mrs. Ancikas’ family planned to leave Lithuania in 1944. The family waited in Vilkaviskis for her grandmother and aunts and uncles to arrive so they could leave together.

“We had been waiting and waiting for them to come and join us, and then run….

“But we had no idea where the Russians were. My mother’s parents and sisters and brothers were already occupied by the Russians…. There was no news, no nothing, because everything was forbidden.”

Ancikas said: “So that’s the reason that so many people left.

“Because they kill…,” she said. “Because they were very, very scared. And they were tortured. In just one year….”

Ancikas said: “During that one year of occupation, the Communists arrested and deported approximately 10 percent of the entire population to Siberia…. They arrested an awful lot of innocent people for no reason whatsoever. At that time there was…no judicial system like there is here in the States, in which you are not guilty until proven (guilty).

“Over there, if the government says, you are. That’s it. There is no trial, no nothing.

“They come around. They arrest you. They have what they call people’s charges. We never really had any understanding of what the justice is all about. It was just hand out sentences — 15, 25, 30 years — without any kind of hearing.”

When the German army first took Mrs. Ancikas’ family, the family lived in a cattle car outside of a camp in Buren, Westphalia, for eight months. Four families — 18 people together — lived in a car no bigger than an average American living room.

Mrs. Ancikas described those months. “All the grown-ups, they have to go and work early in the morning and during the night,” she said. “Remember the war was going on, the eight months in 1944 until 1945, until the war ended. And the bombs dropped, especially on the railroads, and they had to go and fill the holes up and lay the tracks for the trains through….

“Eight months later, we were liberated by American soldiers…. It became an English zone. From then on, we were taken to camps.”

The Ancikases met in England, where he had become a steel worker and she was a student nurse. They married there in 1952. A year later they went to Toronto, where he sold furniture and she worked in data processing.

IN 1965, THEY MOVED to Providence, where he studied computers and went to work for Ciba Geigy Corp. They were transferred to Ardskey, N.Y., and then to the Ciba Geigy office in Greensboro, which brought them to Kernersville. Ancikas retired from Ciba Geigy after 25 years there.

The Ancikases have planned to move to Florida since retiring, but every year they have put it off because they have made many friends where they are.

They have not been back to Lithuania since their visit in 1971.

Ancikas said: “Most of Europe is peaceful (now) except for the Eastern part, but I still wouldn’t want to go back.”  

Mrs. Ancikas said: “As long as a Communist government is in power, Europe is not safe…. We were very young…. This is our country. It’s only that we were born there.”

— By Laura Knight

    Kernersville Journal

    Thursday, February 21, 1991