1 Journey into the Backwaters of the Heart Laima Vincė 2 All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. Laima Vince Sruoginis retains all media and film rights and all story rights. For information please contact Laima Vince Sruoginis at [email protected] 3 Fourth Edition, 2017 Copyright © 2012 Laima Vince Sruoginis All rights reserved. ISBN-13:978-1542329637 ISBN-10:1542329639 4 Dedication This book is dedicated to all people who resist totalitarianism. This book is dedicated to Lithuania's postwar resistance fighters, who sacrificed their young lives for freedom. This book is dedicated to the hundreds of thousands of Baltic exiles, whose bones lay scattered across the frozen expanses of Siberia and the deserts of Tajikistan. Finally, this book is dedicated to Lithuania's Holocaust victims and survivors. Our generation lived through times that were biblical in nature. There was good and there was evil. And there was nothing in between. It was impossible not to choose sides. Each one of us was forced to choose… Leonora Grigalavičiūtė-Rubine (code name Vida) Liaison for the Lithuanian resistance 5 Contents Preface: There Was No Alternative Introduction: The Invisible Front The Teachers Who Signed Their Own Death Sentences The Woman Who Slept with a Packed Suitcase The Girl Who Had No Name Noli Tangere Circulos Meos Journey into the Backwaters of the Heart Playing Chess with the Enemy Digging for the Remains of Juozas Lukša The Will to Live A Saint in Vilijampolė Heimweh Better a Bad Year Than a Bad Man The Witch of Šatrija The Story of Laima: A Cautionary Tale The Liaison Woman This is Not My Sky I Was Only a Postal Carrier Bunker The Baby Born in the Bunker Post-Soviet Tourism: Gawking or Mourning Catharsis 6 Map of the Gulags of Siberia The Gulag is recognized as a major instrument of political repression in the Soviet Union. Hundreds of thousands of Baltic people were deported to the Gulags of Siberia by Stalin in the forties and fifties. The Gulag (Russian: ГУЛаг) was the government agency that administered the system of Soviet hard labor camps. The camps housed large numbers of prisoners, ranging from petty criminals to political prisoners. The word GULag is an acronym in Russian (Главное управление исправительно-трудовых лагерей и колоний or the Latin alphabet: Glavnoye upravlyeniye ispravityel’no- trudovih lagyeryey i koloniy), The English translation is: Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and Colonies. The Gulag was officially created on April 25, 1930 and was dissolved on January 13, 1960. 7 Map of the region. 8 Acknowledgments Almost all of the people I spoke with while collecting these oral histories chose to be represented by their actual names in this book. Only a very few asked that I alter their names to protect their privacy. The life stories collected here were spoken to me in Lithuanian, Russian, German, and in one instance in English. I have translated these stories into English, trying my best to retain the speaker’s original intonation, intent, voice, and sense of humor. Although Journey into the Backwaters of the Heart focuses on the experiences of people in Lithuania and Latvia, similar stories are told in post-Soviet countries all over the former Soviet Union, and in the former Soviet satellites of Central Europe, as well as the Balkans. I feel deeply indebted to the women and men who shared their stories so generously with me. I am honored that they trusted me with retelling their stories to the world. In particular, I’d like to thank Nijolė Brazėnaitė-Lukšienė-Paronetto. Nijolė first inspired me to dig deeper into the heart and mind of the resistance. She gave me moral support as I was collecting these interviews. She also read and commented on individual chapters as they were being developed. I'd like to thank resistance fighter and prisoner of conscience, Jonas Kadžionis, for his wisdom and his insights into morality and human nature, and for sharing his poetry with me. Thank you to my mother, Aldona Simutis, and to Marian Wertalke, for copyediting the manuscript. I'd like to thank Virginia, Ingrida, Irena, and Amanda for accompanying me on some of the interviews and helping me process the stories I heard. Finally, I am grateful to the Fulbright program for providing me with the funding and the intellectual space to record these oral histories and to write this book. Laima Vincė Fulbright Lecturer Vilnius, Lithuania 9 Preface There Was No Alternative By 1945 World War II had ended, but in Lithuania the war of resistance against the Soviet Union had only just begun. One of the bloodiest battles of the Lithuanian armed resistance, the battle of Kalniškės, was fought only days after VE day. For half a century the Soviet Union kept this war a secret. Its participants were hunted down, tortured, and exiled to hard labor camps in Siberia. Its survivors were harassed into silence. Of the three Baltic States, Lithuania fought the hardest and the longest. Over the years, as they continued to resist Soviet rule, they were forgotten by the West. The vastly outnumbered and under-supplied Lithuanians continued to resist their Soviet occupiers for nearly a decade after World War II had ended. Meanwhile, America and Western Europe moved on to reconstruct a peaceful and prosperous postwar Europe. The armed resistance in Lithuania was organized in 1944 as a result of the traumatic experience of the first Soviet occupation of 1940 – 1941. That occupation was still fresh in many people's minds. The return of the Soviets in 1944 created a sense of desperation. Many felt they had no alternative but to join the underground resistance and to fight the occupying forces. Many families lost all or most of their members during the years of the postwar resistance. Arrests, imprisonments, brutal interrogation methods, executions, abductions, and deportations spread fear among the populace. These actions also sparked the will to resist. Many surviving resistance fighters testify that they were motivated to join the resistance because of atrocities committed against their families or to avoid deportation or conscription.1 On a practical level, the loss of independence meant the loss of personal opportunity, property, and wealth. The collectivization of the countryside was perceived as one of the most crucial changes of societal structure forced onto the local populace by the Soviets. After their farm lands were taken away from them, many farm boys felt they had no other choice than to join the Forest Brothers, the resistance. Each new member of the resistance was required to take an oath of loyalty. A few underground training sessions were organized in the forests, but volunteers mainly learned to fight first hand by participating in battles and skirmishes. Almost no high ranking military officers from the prewar Lithuanian army participated in the resistance. At the end of World War II, in 1944, most of the remaining officers who had survived the liquidation of Lithuania’s military officers in 1941 had escaped to the West.2 The leaders of the resistance who did have military experience were of low or middle rank. The well-known chief commanders, Jonas Žemaitis and Adolfas Ramanauskas, during the years of Lithuania's independence, had been an artillery captain and a reserve lieutenant respectively. 10 It is difficult for historians to determine the exact number of participants in Lithuania’s postwar armed resistance because it was nearly impossible at the time, under the circumstances, to maintain accurate records. Possibly up to 100,000 individuals may have either actively participated in the resistance or supported it in some way. Available statistics indicate that between 40,000–50,000 individuals were carrying arms at one point or another during 1944–1953.3 At its peak in the spring of 1945, the resistance was about 30,000 strong. This number diminished in the following years because of amnesties4 and because supply problems made it difficult to maintain such large numbers of resistance fighters in the forests. Increasing pressure from the Soviets further forced the partisan fighters to change their tactics and to operate in smaller, less vulnerable groups. By the end of the 1940s, as the armed resistance was winding down, the active movement consisted of only several thousand individuals. However, the partisans continued to recruit people throughout the late 1940s. The armed resistance strove to set up a plan for a general mobilization to provide support to Western armed forces in the event of a major conflict.5 At the time Lithuanians believed rather literally in the Atlantic Charter and felt that they had to hold out until America inevitably invaded the Soviet Union, freeing the occupied nations. They were not aware that America had agreed to allow the Soviet Union to retain the occupied nations. In addition to the men and women who fought in the armed resistance, a significant number of men and women in the Lithuanian countryside supported the resistance by providing food, shelter, supplies and medicine, and by acting as liaisons. Their efforts enabled the resistance to endure for many years, despite massive attacks and oppressive measures employed by the NKVD6. The endurance of the resistance, despite an almost total lack of support from abroad, can only be explained by the considerable loyal support from the population in the countryside. This is one of the reasons why the resistance in Lithuania was about ten times as intense, and more difficult to stamp out, than the resistance in the two other Soviet occupied Baltic republics, Latvia and Estonia. Extensive civilian support was also one of the main reasons why large numbers of Lithuanians were imprisoned and deported in the years after World War II.