Milda Leaves us February 8, 2021
MILDA IRENE BARTNIKAS SPINDLER, 93, was a refugee profoundly shaped by World War II. She and her family endured hardships and loss, but she had the resiliency to move to a new land, start her own family, and become a remarkable woman, parent, teacher, and artist.
Milda was born December 19, 1927, in Siaulai, Lithuania, the second of three children of Andrius and Eugenia Bartnikas. In early childhood, she enjoyed summers in the countryside with her family. They accompanied her father, a land surveyor who worked to
distribute manorial lands to the peasantry, walking through the woods and farms of central Lithuania. As a young girl Milda developed a deep appreciation of nature by harvesting berries, mushrooms, flowers, and garden vegetables. Then, in 1938 when Milda was 10, her father died of kidney failure.
In 1939, the Soviet Union was set to control Lithuania under the secret Molotov-Ribbentrop pact with Nazi Germany. Fourteen-year old Milda fled to Berlin in 1941, with her widowed mother and two siblings, to join relatives. She studied languages in a girls’ middle-high school. Starting in autumn of 1943, Allied bombing forced the family to spend sleepless nights huddled in the basement of their apartment. Milda then evacuated with her school to Policka, a small town east of Prague, Czechoslovakia, while her family remained in Berlin.
In spring 1945 the school fled again, 300 miles on foot, towards Austria and the Allied Western front, trying to stay ahead of the approaching Russian army. With other high school students, Milda shepherded the younger girls as they walked, begging for food and sleeping on hay in barns along their path. At one point, the school principal assigned Milda and her classmates to care for wounded soldiers at a field hospital in exchange for one meal a day.
Simultaneously her mother, sister, and brother were fleeing Berlin ahead of the advancing Soviets. Many train tracks and bridges were destroyed, so they also walked, sometimes begging a ride from a passing truck. Milda remembered constant hunger, worry over separated relatives, and all of humanity under duress -- situations that worsened at the end of the war.
“Everything was getting real scary…,” she recalled, “We were hungry most of the time. People tried to live on one potato a day; they were wearing the only clothes they owned and were often cold. Shoes were wearing out and feet were blistered. Most people were happy just to be alive.”
When the war ended, Milda reunited with her family in Austria and settled in a United Nations displaced persons’ camp in Augsburg, Germany. Because she was fluent in Lithuanian, German and English, and knew some Russian and Czech, the UN hired Milda as a translator for the refugee camps. In late 1947 she met her future husband, Albert Spindler, a soldier in the US Army.
In spring 1948 Milda emigrated to Canada, because they accepted WWII refugees. Her mother and siblings followed a year later to live an unheated attic apartment in Toronto, Ontario. Milda worked as a nanny and later as a keypunch operator to pay their bills. Milda overcame the hardship of coming to a foreign country as an immigrant without anything.
She married Albert in 1949 and moved to the United States, where she worked for the New York Central Railroad and studied at the Munson William Proctor Arts Institute in Utica. Albert and Milda raised four boys in Utica, Syracuse, and Buffalo, New York. Having known hunger and hardship, Milda made sure to prepare wholesome meals shared as a family. She loved holidays and visits with her siblings because it involved elaborate feasting, a Lithuanian tradition.
Drawing upon her childhood experiences with nature, she organized summer camping trips to parks in the Adirondacks, Finger Lakes, and Allegheny areas of New York, plus Vermont, Maine, and southern Canada. Overseeing trips with four boys must have been daunting, but she created a memorable foundation for her children to learn hiking, camping, fishing, and boating skills. While the family’s life was bountiful in western New York, sadly, Milda experienced discrimination because of her slight accent, despite being a naturalized US citizen. She taught her children acceptance of all.
In 1971 the family moved to suburban New Orleans, Louisiana, where they continued to enjoy the outdoors, boating on the bayous, Lake Pontchartrain, and the Gulf coast. They bought a small acreage in southern Mississippi, where Milda maintained a huge vegetable garden, picked pecans and berries, and did artwork beneath her beloved live-oak trees. As her children began to leave the nest, Milda resumed art studies, earning a Bachelors in Fine Arts at the age of 51 from the University of New Orleans in 1979.
From 1971 to 2017, she sketched, painted, and developed a unique style of printmaking. Much of her work is inspired by nature and people enjoying nature. She was a member of the New Orleans and Jefferson Art Guilds. Lithuania’s national art gallery featured Milda’s work in a showing of expatriate art (Vytautas Kasiulis Museum of Art in Vilnius: https://tinyurl.com/1lrgekfr. Other images can be viewed on this site. “I think it is important to talk about a person’s individuality as a form of freedom of choice,” she said, “which was so lacking during the war years. Creating art is my way of expressing individuality.”
Parenting four boys close in age was a challenge, yet she hardly raised her voice. She nurtured them to become successful men, husbands, and fathers through her own example. She instilled upon her children values of hard work, kindness, persistence, optimism, love of nature, and generosity. She was one of the most selfless persons imaginable.
Milda died surrounded by loved ones February 8, 2021, in Metairie, LA, after struggling with a heart condition, and more recently dementia. She is preceded in death by her parents, husband Albert, sister Danguole (Diana) Jaffee, and granddaughter Maegan. She is survived by her brother Rimvydas (Ray), four married sons Michael (Pam), Gregg (Susan), Steven (Aymee), and William (Wendy). She is the proud grandmother of David, Sara, Tamara, Matthew, Alison, Gabrielle, Alexa, and great grandmother of Raevyn and Nicolas.
A memorial Mass is scheduled for 11AM-noon March 17, (visitation one hour prior) at St. Louis King of France Church in Metairie, LA. Interment will follow at the Biloxi National Military Cemetery, MS. Covid-19 precautions of masking and social distancing will be required.
Reprinted from: Milda Spindler Obituary - New Orleans, LA (dignitymemorial.com)