Vidas made some astounding discoveries while I was in Lithuania.  Please understand, I do not speak word one of Lithuanian.  In Vilnius, people spoke English, but in the countryside, not so much.

In Striupai, where the Patz and Eakel/Jakel families were from, he knocked on doors and asked where there might be a German cemetery.  One lady told him her mother had told her that there was an abandoned German cemetery in the woods.  This is in a place that  suffered tremendously in the Second World War.  The town was the site of a battle between the Wehrmacht and the Red Army.  There were no buildings that pre-dated 1945.  They all had the same tired, gray look of Soviet architecture.  Some people with money had moved in and there were big houses with swimming pools in a country where it snows most months of the year.

Vidas drove up a…