Nowadays, things are much simpler: if you have a phone in your pocket, you also have a device that might be spying on you. But I’d like to take you back to much more exciting times when nothing was so simple and easy.
Lithuania in 1918 already had an expanding network of secret services. Since the new state couldn’t dedicate much money to such affairs, the spy squad was organized exclusively from women: sisters of St. Zita, maids. So if you have a housekeeper, you need to be more careful than ever.
The housekeeper cleans your drawers, manages your desktops, takes out the rubbish (and sieves through it, no doubt). The housekeepers tend to walk around unnoticed, you look at them as you would at a piece of furniture, a dumb rug. All the more so because this halfwit is completely uneducated, often doesn’t understand what is being said to her and speaks no foreign language whatsoever.
Ha. Well, she doesn’t. Maybe she can’t speak. Or maybe she doesn’t want to. Here, look at me, the cat, the brilliant teller of this story: I could be the best of spies. My coat is black, I have white gloves, long whiskers and erect ears. I love to be petted. All the spies I had a chance to meet were the best petters. I guess they suspected we had something in common. If I want, I can purr so sweetly that the hypnotized secret agents will reveal all their secrets to me. If I want, I can meow like a siren when the secret services try to stick a listening bug under the desktop.
Why am I talking so much about spies? Because there are tons of them, those spies. Haven’t you heard that by 1939, the Lithuanian security services had detained 302 people spying in favor of Poland (42 of them women), 87 (3 women) spying for Germany, and there had to be four times more Soviet agents than all of these put together.
But numbers bore me, they make me yawn. We cats, when not sleeping or hunting, mostly like to play. Come ooon, plaaay with meee-eow. Let’s travel to Lithuania just before the outbreak of the Second World War: I will show you the city of Kaunas where there were so many spies that it was later dubbed the Northern Casablanca. I will show you how your peers lived back then, I will tell you eleven stories. They might include spies, forgers, and ordinary housekeepers - only the eyes of the cat can see such rogues through, people usually can’t distinguish who is who. So never forget:
Spies and Frauds of Every Hair Tend to be Very Nice People. (And cats, of course, cats!)
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