Family stories and a search for our Baltic roots

Fair enough: a great-great-grandfather is so remote he can hardly be real to a 20-year-old. Jacobson seemed to underscore the imaginative effort required when he said his contemporaries thought their Lithuanian immigrant forebears simply came from "Nowhere".

No one ever truly finds what they are looking for - but we came so close

My husband and I however felt these places must be far from vanished figments. We wanted not only to see what was left physically, but to connect with the past. Coming with us on this trip, might our son feel these were his histories too?

We spent a weekend on Lithuania's Baltic coast, in Klaipeda, formerly Memel, the most northerly point of Germany, and the Curonian Spit, where the writer Thomas Mann took holidays. We would travel with a guide in the countryside near Kaunas before going to Latvia for another ancestral day trip in the company of friends.

Before we had even started looking for roots, Jewish life hit us unexpectedly. We chanced upon an exuberant Shabbat lunch on the grounds of Klaipeda's pre-war cemetery. Despite arriving late we were welcomed as if unexpected foreign visitors turn up weekly to this frum redoubt. Speaking fast Russian between mouthfuls of mushrooms and vodka, Lyuba, Boris and Daniel set out plates and urged us to join them.

Jewish life in Klaipeda received its final humiliation under the Soviets, they explained. The cemetery was crushed to rubble and an antenna was mounted on top to jam broadcasts from Voice of America.

That Shabbat, the bearded men and women in headscarves in the Klaipeda shtiebl could not have demonstrated greater Jewish continuity; they talked of children in Israel and Hendon, and asked us whether it is safe to wear a kippa in London.

As we drove east we left the narrow strip of what had once been East Prussia, where Jews had sought escape from the Russian Pale of Settlement. Twenty kilometres from Klaipeda we turned off after a brown heritage sign pointing to Žydu. We walked down a lane between houses, wondering what we might find in so quiet a place. Through a blue metal gate with a Magen David on it we stepped into the shady old Jewish cemetery of Gargždai. A meadow with overgrown wonky headstones and a high brick wall was a precious testament to centuries of Jewish life.

My husband read out macabre facts about the sudden ending of Jewish Gorzd from Wikipedia and JewishGen. He had one ancestor from here, but we knew nothing of the town's fate. When we talk about the extermination of the Jews, we often neglect what happened in the Baltics, perhaps because the death camps and ghettos have taken pole position in our collective remembering of the Holocaust.

This territory forms part of what Yale historian Timothy Snyder has called "Bloodlands". By the end of 1941 more than one million Jews had been killed there, mainly by mass shooting. Gargždai, right by the German border, was where the slaughter of Jews began when Hitler's army invaded the Soviet Union and the Baltic countries.

We looked for the spot where on June 24, 1941, 200 men were shot by Germans and Lithuanian police. We missed it at first, then set eyes on a plaque in front of low-rise flats near a bus terminus. Its Lithuanian and Yiddish words said little about the event that ushered in the deaths of ten thousands, totally, at huge speed, and without warning.

People seemed to pass by paying no attention. The significance was surely bigger than this quiet six-foot slab suggested.

"To live in the environment where the spirit of those people is calling for remembrance and to reflect it - is not easy," writes Lithuanian poet Antanas Jonynas on a website remembering Jewish life in Lithuania (litvaks-lithuanian-jewish.com). "The most comfortable and easiest way is simply not to think about that."

The provincial towns we visited in Lithuania and Latvia are inhabited, but hardly bustling. Many young people have emigrated. Life goes on, without Jews.

But perhaps the spirit cannot be subdued. In the heart of Kèdainiai, an hour north of Kaunas, stands a fairytale cobbled market square bordered by two stone synagogues, one for winter, one for summer. One is now a multicultural tolerance centre displaying objects and photos of the Jews who were once the majority of its inhabitants. "We cannot ignore the special aura of this town, as we live here," a curator told us.

We hooked up with our Lithuanian Jewish guide, Chaim Bargman, for an intense day touring five towns near Kaunas in the former Suwalki and Kovno provinces. Chaim is a throwback to a pre-smartphone Soviet era of human relations, who gleans information from talking to people and shares on a need-to-know basis. He could rely on leaning out of the window and shouting "Where's the Jews' killing place?" for almost any passerby to set us on the right road. At each new town we piled out of the car for a photo by the entrance sign, my husband thrilled to finally be arriving at places he had thought about for so long. Moved to a sense of belonging, he even posed for more pictures at the deserted Vilkaviškis bus station.

But Isaac had not yet made the same connection, stopping short of complaining at our tiresomely long journey. "I was interested in coming here, to confirm there's nothing left, as a kind of challenge," said Isaac. "Though I know my family came from here, it does feel quite far from me. I feel quite British."

Slowly, the grandeur of the old burial places and their role as the remains of a lost culture began to impress themselves on him. We read out inscriptions and mirrored the finger positions of the engraved two hands for Cohanim on the head of stones. Isaac picked up sticks to scrape off moss.

A cousin had remarked before our departure: "No one ever finds what they are looking for." Sure, looking for evidence of your family is a long shot. But we got close. I stood on the ground in Prienai where a great-great grandfather of the 1860s was almost certainly laid to rest, leaving an orphaned infant who later arrived in Leeds.

Our walks resonated peace. A woman stopped for a swim in a stream below the cemetery of Kudirkos Naumiestis, right on the border with what is now Russia's Kaliningrad region. Apart from her, we barely saw a soul. "It's just air," Isaac sighed, weighing the loss. But this is air that we are privileged to breathe, I thought, the same that sustained our ancestors, right here. They would have seen the same cloud-blown skies over endless flat fields, storks swooping to giant nests, powerful rivers and stirring pine trees. And we were touching places beyond capital cities, where even our guide had not taken visitors for years.

The town where my husband had the most famous connections refused to yield its secrets, leaving us wondering if the places of our family trees were really just imagined.

We went to Kudirkos Naumiestis because he deduced his rabbinical ancestors Abba Dayan and Abba Abelson came from there. But no, we were told, the place has changed name, and country, many times. You want Schirwindt, not Neustadt-Schirwindt or even Vladislavov. It's over the river, across the border with Russia. But you won't find it. It went up in flames in 1944.

Most Jewish sites have not benefited from investments of heritage money, nor been expertly curated for visitors. I did not find a holistic gazetteer of Lithuanian Jewish information on the internet. Our guide was exasperated at the deliberate misinformation of monuments from the Soviet decades.

The graveyards are unkempt, without the symbolism of poppies or The Last Post playing at sunset that Isaac had seen on a school trip to French World War One sites.

In sharp contrast to the empty countryside, when we arrived in Latvia we found Riga packed with visitors. University friends from England joined us looking for roots in Jaunjelgava, once Friedrichstadt, on the Daugava river near towns of our ancestors.

We were guided by historian Aleksandrs Feigmanis and driver Mark Ioffe, a genealogy buff. Our first stop challenged the limits of all our imaginations. Twenty five thousand mostly Latvian Jews were force-marched 10 km from the Riga ghetto over two weekends at the end of 1941 to their deaths in a forest. Hardly anyone survived.

Rumbula is marked by a metal sculpture leaning over a highway. A flight of wooden steps leads steeply up to a railway line. This was one of the largest single exterminations of Jews of the war, at that time only second in scale to the September 1941 killings at Babi Yar, Ukraine.

"I'm struggling to bridge the imaginative gap," said Isaac. "I keep asking myself, how should one act at a massacre site?"

We had travelled to the Baltics with a longing to find significance, and warnings that we might find nothing. We did not know the fates of our relatives in the war, but the places they lived, which we knew abstractly from documents, took on a reality of their own. Approaching Krustpils (formerly Kreuzberg), home town of my mother's grandfather, we found a road sign for a hamlet, Spunğeni. Surely this was the source of my family's name, Spurgin, or, as our guides insisted, its likely original, Shpungin.

This made me a near-celebrity in the eyes of our driver. A famous Semyon Shpungin survived the Daugavpils (Dvinsk) ghetto aged 12 and lived on to become a journalist in Riga, he said. Perhaps he was my relative?

Our friend was reaching back through generations of English assimilation for Latvian Jews. Maybe, she suggested as we strolled the side streets of Krustpils, there was a folk memory we could tap into?

Freud wrote of the uncanny, the Unheimlich, an idea that centres on home. That afternoon we experienced the prickling tension of comfort and rejection ourselves.

As we stopped for a group photo by the Daugava, we learned something we had never realised.

We could see Jekabpils on the opposite bank, now unified with Krustpils as one city but historically separate. My husband and I understood for the first time that our two sets of great-grandparents in opposite towns could have seen each other across the same river, centuries before we met in another country, another time…

Undeniably, elements of Lithuanian society still "glorify the Jew Killers", as our Lithuanian guide put it. Memorials have gone up in country towns to national heroes known to be responsible for Jewish deaths. Efforts to correct the historical record or persuade local authorities to take them down have not succeeded.

As well as ignorance and ongoing mistrust, I sensed an openness among Lithuanians and Latvians towards connecting and filling knowledge gaps with and about Jews.

Politicians are waking up to the need to document and preserve sites. The Latvia Names Project (names.lu.lv/en.html) seeks to identify Latvian Jewish Holocaust victims. Expat North Americans have even opened a bagel café in Vilnius.

But more can, and surely must, be done. Perhaps it is for us in the UK with other Litvak descendants around the world to make this Jewish past visible, to connect our enduring identity to the Lithuanian present with innovative creative projects, on their doorstep.

In Riga's renovated Art Nouveau Peitav Shul Isaac fell into the open arms of Chabad students, who helped him lay Tefillin. Familiar with their outreach from a holiday in Thailand, he was not surprised to find active Jewish practice in Riga, which felt to him like any modern European capital.

"The fact I went on this roots tour shows that I'm not totally assimilated, I am proud of my identity, both Jewish and English," he said.

A few days later his friend had a cooler reception in the same synagogue, which may have been because she visited on Tisha Ba'av during a service. But she felt the treatment unfair, and a heated debate ensued with Isaac over the qualities of the ideal synagogue.

I could not help thinking this must have echoed arguments doing the rounds in Riga in historian Simon Dubnow's day, or Kovno when Hebrew novelist Abraham Mapu was alive.

Indeed there were so many shuls in these communities, one could only imagine they fulfilled the old joke of having one to belong to and at least one to avoid.

Hester Abrams is a journalist and producer. Some names have been changed.