THE RED SANDALS

Taranaki Daily News, 2 December 1933, Page 7 (Supplement)

THE RED SANDALS

(By

Elisabeth Kyle.)

Go into that little room of the museum at Kaunas, Lithuania’s capital, where a few pieces of shabby gilded furniture taken from - abandoned manor houses remind you of vanished, pre-war glories; and stand before the mid-Victorian painting of a little girl, dimpled and ringletted, in a high-waisted muslin frock and a pair of red heel-less sandals crossed with elastic over the instep . . • She is the daughter of a Polish-Lithu-anian noble. Her home—that glistening white building showing its Baroque curves between the painted branches of the forest out of which she steps—is now a State hospital for sick children. And she herself, now old, blind and deaf, lies waiting for the end in a small wooden cottage on the outskirts of Kaunas—those ramshackle outskirts which still point to the time before the war, when Kannas was little more, than a large village or small provincial town. Her history is that of the vanished order to which she belonged. Her family, originally Polish, had lived for 200 years on Lithuanian soil taken from the peasants. She knew the glittering Court life of old St. Petersburg, the great autumn hunting-pai-ties in the forest through which she had roamed as a child. Because she had no brothers she had inherited the place, and she had married, and brought up her children there. /

Then came the war. The Germans took possession, and later, when the Lithuanians had asserted their independence, the bulk of her estate was given back to the people. For some years she struggled against age and poverty, striving to remain there quietly in her childhood’s house. But at ths last, it was her own children who dispossessed her by their debts and extravagance.

For a little, old as she was, she made a living by doing French translation work for the new Government which, raw, and unaccustomed to officialdom, was glad of her sophisticated services and knowledge of the world. When

she got too old for that, they recognised her family’s long connection with the country by granting her the pension which secures her peace for the little time left.

And, as a mark of gratitude, she has presented almost the only remembrance left of her past life—the portrait of a child standing, scarlet sandalled on the threshold of a world eventually to crumble up and disappear before her eyes.