When I met Olga Stramat in her nineties, she told me she was a Litvac and said, “A Litvac is a true Lithuanian. We lived on the southern border next to Russia and Poland. My grandmother was from Germany, so I learned to speak German as a child. My mother cleaned houses for a living, and we were very poor. My little playmates had dolls to play with. I longed for a doll. Of course my mother could not afford to buy me a doll, so I asked my grandfather. My grandfather refused to speak German with his wife because he hated the Germans. He spoke French to her. Grandmother hated the French but she did not refuse to speak the language. Grandfather heard me ask for the doll. He had a stick he always carried. He held the stick out to me, and he asked me if I wanted his stick. I said no, and he said, ‘She is smart. She does not want my stick.’”
“I made my own doll out of a jar and some rags to look like the doll's head. I stuck the rag head on the jar. Then I made some rag clothes for my doll.”
Olga continued, “I wanted to learn, and I asked my mother to send me to school. She said, ‘No, you are too stupid to go to school. It would be a waste of money.’ I asked my grandmother and she said the same thing to me.
“My mother warned me not to play with the Polish and Russian girls. My mother did not like foreigners. But I played with them anyway, because I wanted to learn the languages. I wanted to learn everything, and I spoke German with my Grandmother, French and Lithuanian with my mother, Russian and Polish with my playmates.”
“At age six I played with Seroshka and his sister Anna. Seroshka called his sister Honka instead of Anna, and they spoke a slang dialect of Russian from far up toward Siberia. They asked me to go feather picking with them. We went to the railroad and found empty freight cars left dirty from hauling geese. During the train rides half the geese died from the crowded conditions, and as you may know, dead geese lose many of their feathers. The loose feathers became caught in the droppings, and we picked it up and carried it home in buckets. It was dirty work. We washed and dried the feathers, and my poor mother sold the feathers for a few pennies to the Jewish rag man when he came to our neighborhood.
“When I was eight my mother got me a job as a baby sitter. My mother continued to tell me I was too dumb and worthless to be sent to school. I was the baby sitter for four children, and the job lasted several years. I earned one ruble a week. For me it was a lot of money, and it helped support my mother."
When Olga Stramat was eight years old in Lithuania she was skinny. Her mother Helen was a poor cleaning woman. It was 1908 on the day Russians called Mayufka or May Day. All the children were taken to the forest for a picnic, games, and relay races. The girls raced against the girls, and the boys raced against each other. During one of the races, Olga and a larger girl ran into each other at full speed and their heads collided. Olga's right eye popped out of the socket and hung down on her cheek. When her mother saw her she was shocked and frightened. Helen could not afford taking her child to a doctor. When people were poor they went to the drug store to see the lady druggist. The Jewish lady druggist never asked for money, and she was always able to help poor people. She always knew what to do. Helen was a Catholic, but she knew the lady would be the only one in the village with the ability to fix her daughter's eye.
The Jewish druggist had been educated at a college with her husband, and she knew about anatomy and medicine. When Olga came to her with her right eye fallen out, the lady druggist was not worried. She said, “I can put your eye back in, and it will heal. You will need to lie still. It will hurt for a minute when I put it in, but later, it will stop hurting.”
The skinny child lay still as the woman worked the eye very gently over the empty eye socket. She manipulated the eye into perfect alignment, placed both her thumbs over the eyeball and gave a sudden thrust. The eye popped back into place. Six months later Helen noticed her little girl was able to see out of her eye again. The eye muscles remained a little lazy for many years.
The old lady continued her story, “I was fourteen when my grandparents sent me to Brooklyn, New York to live with my aunt. My aunt got me a job as a housekeeper for a rich American family in a Jewish neighborhood, and I learned to speak Yiddish and English. My eye muscles gained strength and I could see better. At age fifteen I already spoke six languages, English, Jewish, Polish, Russian, German, and Lithuanian.”
"Now, at age ninety two, I am blessed with good vision, I read well and speak six languages. I came a long way from being a feather picker in Europe."