{"id":5277,"date":"2018-05-22T16:45:36","date_gmt":"2018-05-22T22:45:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.draugas.org\/news\/?p=5277"},"modified":"2018-05-22T16:45:36","modified_gmt":"2018-05-22T22:45:36","slug":"we-thought-wed-be-back-soon-18-stories-of-refugees-1940-44-selected-and-edited-by-dalia-stake-anysas-dalia-cidzikaite%cc%87-and-alaima-petrauskas-vanderstoep","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.draugas.org\/news\/we-thought-wed-be-back-soon-18-stories-of-refugees-1940-44-selected-and-edited-by-dalia-stake-anysas-dalia-cidzikaite%cc%87-and-alaima-petrauskas-vanderstoep\/","title":{"rendered":"We Thought We\u2019d Be Back Soon: 18 Stories of Refugees 1940-44 Selected and Edited by Dalia Stake Anysas, Dalia Cidzikaite\u0307, and ALaima Petrauskas Vanderstoep"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sandra Baksys.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

\""We
“We Thought We\u2019d Be Back Soon” book cover.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As traumatized survivors of three invasions of their homeland (Soviets in 1940, Nazis in 1941, and Soviets, again, in 1944), members of Lithuania\u2019s \u201cDP\u201d generation were famously tight-lipped about their World War II refugee experiences.<\/span><\/p>\n

Until my father Vince was in his 70s and 80s, I learned few details of his flight from the family farm near Vidukl\u0117, Lithuania, in October 1944, at age 25, with two horses, a carriage with a milk cow tied to the back\u2013and only about half of his eight brothers and sisters.<\/span><\/p>\n

Dad\u2019s \u201coral history\u201d was taken piecemeal by multiple daughters over many years and was never written down. As a result, we are probably lucky to have learned of Dad\u2019s involuntary induction\u2014along with his brothers\u2014 into a support unit of the German Army in December 1944, his winter 1945 capture by the U.S. Army, and his subsequent 16 months of starvation and hard labor as a POW under various Allied commands.<\/span><\/p>\n

Dad\u2019s fateful somersault, upon his release in June 1946, from abused POW to service in the U.S. Army \u201cHome Guard,\u201d is astounding to consider. But there are many similar twists of fate in the 18 Lithuanian oral histories that comprise this collection selected and edited by Dalia Stake Anysas, Dalia Cidzikaite, and Laima Petrauskas Vanderstoep.<\/span><\/p>\n

Each of these recorded and edited interviews benefits from standard questions deliberately selected for their historical relevance. Likewise, the book\u2019s formal oral history approach draws out emotion and detail that otherwise might never fully emerge from the natural chaos of conversation.\u00a0<\/span>The interviewers\u2019 interjections and follow-up questions, plus careful editing, add even more critical value by helping to sustain a narrative line that might easily have been lost in conversation\u2019s tendency to digress.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"A Tapestry of Refugee Experience<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Taken in the mid-to-late 1990s, some 50 years after the events being remembered, these personal histories provide a tapestry of war-time experiences disparate in their details. Yet, more than a few of the stories are so richly detailed that they stand as microcosms of the whole.<\/span><\/p>\n

In features common to many, fleeing men are separated from their families and forced to dig foxholes under Soviet artillery fire, much as cars and farm animals have previously been requisitioned for the German war effort. (The struggle of Lithuanian civilians to remain non-combatants begins with Lithuanian resistance to the formation of an SS unit, to which the Nazi occupation authority responds by closing Lithuanian universities.)<\/span><\/p>\n

Everywhere on the refugee road are Lithuanian women fleeing with small children, sometimes giving birth in open wagons in the cold and rain.\u00a0<\/span>As well, there is the unique vulnerability of minors wandering World War II\u2019s killing fields without parental guidance or protection.<\/span><\/p>\n

More than anything, we experience the refugees\u2019 constant struggle with hunger and exposure to the elements, plus the difficulty of transit further and further west as the Soviet Army advances.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"\u2018Why Did You Leave?\u2019<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

One of the biggest historical questions the interviewers set out to nail down for posterity was, \u201cWhy did you leave?\u201d Almost unanimously, the refugees in this collection\u2014from urban academics, teachers and public officials to remote villagers and farmers\u2014say they had been slated for a second round of mass deportations to Siberia that the Soviets did not have time to implement before being driven out of Lithuania by the German Army in June 1941. (Soviet deportation lists became public during the subsequent German occupation.) <\/span><\/p>\n

The atrocity-level treatment of those 1941 deportees, combined with the brutal NKVD torture and murder of Lithuanian detainees in places like Rainiai Forest, sowed a lasting terror among tens of thousands more so-called \u201cenemies of the state\u201d who could expect similar treatment upon the Russians\u2019 return in 1944.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"Inextricably tied to this \u201cwhy\u201d is the question of how long the refugees expected to be gone. As it turns out, none of the young refugees who ended up exiled for the rest of their lives expected, when they fled, to be gone more than a few months.<\/span><\/p>\n

Over and over, the reader\u2019s sense is that the decision to leave in its full scope and finality was never actually made. For most of the subjects, flight was a series of immediate crisis survival steps without am overarching plan.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2018Who Could Have Known?\u2019<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

At the same time, Russia\u2019s military alliance with the Western powers, as well as the presence of U.S. troops in Germany, implied to the mass of Lithuanian refugees fleeing in summer and autumn 1944 a degree of Western influence over Russia sufficient to restore Lithuanian independence at war\u2019s end and a quick return home.<\/span><\/p>\n

To return, the refugees needed Lithuania\u2019s borders to return, which unfortunately, didn\u2019t happen for another 50 years. Confidence in Western influence over the situation first began to erode as early as spring 1945 when the \u201cDPs\u201d witnessed Soviet soldiers crossing freely from the Russian zone into the British, French, and American occupation zones where the refugees had taken shelter.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"To the refugees\u2019 chagrin, Soviet political commissars also were allowed freely to roam the displaced persons (\u201cDP\u201d) camps, arguing and cajoling for the frightened \u00e9migr\u00e9s\u2019 return. Initially, according to these witnesses, some Russians, Balts, and Byelorussians were forcibly transported to the Soviet zone. <\/span><\/p>\n

According to Adolfas Damu\u0161is, a lifesaving \u201cno forced repatriation policy\u201d was obtained with the help of Lithuanians\u2014perhaps exiled officials of the VLIK\u2013working within UNRRA, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration that operated the camps.<\/span><\/p>\n

Bron\u0117 Urbonien\u0117 relates how some Yugoslav and Ukrainian \u201cDPs\u201d decided to fight back, attacking, overturning, and burning the jeep of Russian political commissars entering their camp to \u201cregister\u201d refugees for repatriation. \u201cIn the jeep\u2019s trunk, they (the frightened and enraged \u201cDPs\u201d) found all kinds of photographs and lists of us all, the refugees there. And that happened\u2026in the American zone in Munich\u2026There (must have been) people among us who worked for them (the Soviets).<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"What They Left Behind, and Why<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Within the context of the short-term absence the refugees anticipated, educator Jonas Kavali\u016bnas explains that sick family members\u2014even minor children\u2014were left behind on extended family members\u2019 farms. In the short-term, it was assumed the physically weak would be better off with plenty to eat than on a trek into the wartime unknown.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Other evidence of the \u201cDP\u201d expectation of a quick return is found in the universal practice of burying valuables on the homestead for subsequent retrieval\u2014everything from china dishes to store-bought Sunday clothes.\u00a0<\/span>This reflected a fear of theft not just by local opportunists, but also the same \u201cbeggarly\u201d Soviet Army that had invaded, occupied, and looted Lithuania 1940-41.<\/span><\/p>\n

The burial of one family\u2019s supply of lard near \u0160iauliai (flour, bacon and lard turn out to be life-saving provisions) is indicative of yet another phenomenon. For many refugees, far more than any global decision to abandon the homeland, retreat was a spontaneous series of stops, starts, and off-loadings of possessions that reflected the advance of the Soviet Army and the hope that leaving Lithuania altogether could be avoided. <\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"Only that final spasm of retreat across Lithuania\u2019s western border in horse-drawn wagon or on foot invokes such classic gestures of exile as stopping to scoop up a handful of earth. Old people reportedly ask to be awakened as they cross the border so they can catch one last glimpse of the homeland.<\/span><\/p>\n

Falling Back with Germans\u00a0<\/span>\u2014or Nazis?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

As a fractal of the bigger \u201cWhy leave Lithuania\u201d question, the modern American reader might wonder why Lithuanians were falling back on the same roads, trains, and ships as Nazi forces. The answers given here are not always explicit because the dilemma of being caught between Stalin and Hitler without any third option was, to the refugees, completely self-evident.<\/span><\/p>\n

Bookkeeper Brone Parbaciene, whose husband has been tortured and mutilated to death by the NKVD at Rainiai Forest, lays it out straight: \u201cI had already suffered at the hands of the Russians, so I fled to the other side, which took us in.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Valerija \u0160ileikien\u0117 explains, \u201cWe thought: two devils\u2013one\u2019s brown and the other\u2019s red. Let\u2019s choose the brown devil.\u201d Nevertheless, as refugee families flee deeper into \u201cGerman lands,\u201d their life-and-death need for shelter and work-linked food ration cards\u2014as well as transit papers to reunite with their involuntary inducted husbands\u2013makes them more and more dependent on German authorities and individuals.\u00a0 <\/span>Because of this dependence, it is impossible for either the refugee or the reader to see Lithuanians\u2019 German hosts as uniformly evil.<\/span><\/p>\n

A Range of German Experiences<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"We have callous Nazi-loving estate owners who force Lithuanians to work for insufficient food and sleep with their children in filthy pigsties. We have soldiers who shoot hungry refugees whose only crime was to enter abandoned Konigsberg \/ Karaliau\u010dius homes from which Germans have fled. But we also have small German farmers, soldiers, bureaucrats, and midwives who help to feed, clothe, and shelter a flood of anti-Soviet refugees amid the shared hardships of war.<\/span><\/p>\n

One Lithuanian mother gratefully remembers how her toddler received an egg every day, despite German food shortages. Another mother is efficiently delivered of her placenta, post-childbirth on the open road, by a German Army doctor in retreat who refuses any payment. German police who initially insist penniless refugees pay their own train fares to an interrogation point proceed to lend them the cash to do so\u2014which the refugees conscientiously repay after finding work.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Advantages of Language<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Over and again, German culture and language proficiency permits Lithuanian professionals and intellectuals to bargain for what they need from harried authorities and locate and take refuge with friends and relatives already living in \u201cGerman lands\u201d (meaning Karaliau\u010dius and occupied Poland as well as Germany, itself).<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"However, the helpful German connections possessed by Lithuanian academics and professionals who trained in German institutions or worked in interwar German-owned businesses were lacking among rural Lithuanian refugees\u2014with negative results.\u00a0<\/span>For example, not understanding German, perhaps my farmer father and his brothers didn\u2019t even know they were being inducted until they were spirited by train to Innsbruck, Austria, in December 1944 for basic training. <\/span><\/p>\n

Not knowing the language, and without any skills critical to war-time civilian life, Dad and his brothers certainly lacked any bargaining chips at a time when Germany\u2019s military needs were desperate.\u00a0<\/span>One of my aunts was even put to work in a German anti-aircraft battery.\u00a0<\/span>Lithuanian doctors like Juozas Me\u0161kauskas and Janina Jak\u0161evi\u010dien\u0117, meanwhile, were immediately assigned to understaffed civilian hospitals and clinics.<\/span><\/p>\n

Farmers\u2019 Unique Trauma<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Subsistence Lithuanian farmers experienced many other unique traumas in their flight from homesteads whose improvement had been the work of their entire lives\u2014the land and its cycles, their entire world. For these rural refugees, the reality of all they were leaving hit hardest when being relieved of their horses and wagons after crossing Lithuania\u2019s western border. (Milk cows often had been abandoned on the road because they couldn\u2019t keep pace with wagons).<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"Farmer Juozas Taoras tells how he and his wife go to see the horses they were forced to sell the day before to the German Army:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201c(At first) when we fled, we weren\u2019t sorry for anything, just to get away faster,\u201d he recalls. But as the couple approaches their horses, the animals recognize them. Having gone unfed and tied to a rail all day and night, the animals begin neighing and pawing expectantly, hoping their longtime owners will feed and water them.<\/span><\/p>\n

Helplessly, Taoras recalls, \u201cWe came up and stroked them\u2026and both my wife and I began to cry because they had pulled so faithfully, they had pulled so much that they were now skin and bones.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

The couple\u2019s loss in this moment goes beyond the transportation they still need but have lost\u2014even beyond humane concerns.\u00a0 <\/span>What they feel is \u201can abandonment\u201d at the stripping away of their \u201clast asset\u201d \u2014 abandonment, with no last vestige of their former lives and selves. <\/span><\/p>\n

History in the Human Voice<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

By its accumulation of such detail, We Thought We\u2019d Be Back Soon enhances anything the reader may already have believed or known about the flight of the Lithuanian \u201cDP\u201d generation. Almost without effort, \u201cDP\u201d descendants will find gaps in their own family stories filled.<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s as if a veil between the generations has been lifted, and we can suddenly see our parents or grandparents as they were when they were young during a desperate time in a different world. We are there.\u00a0 <\/span>And certain images and anecdotes, different for each reader, will linger long after the reading is finished.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"On the humorous side, we have an invading Nazi column that stops on the outskirts of a Lithuanian town in June 1941 so the soldiers can shine their shoes and shave before presenting themselves as occupiers.<\/span><\/p>\n

For the heart-wrenching, we have the story of a Lithuanian refugee infant born into such hunger and want that she dies on a train passing through Berlin in late 1944 and is buried by German strangers in between bombardments.<\/span><\/p>\n

Then, there is the Lithuanian railroad manager who refuses passage on one of the last departing overcrowded trains to the wife and children of his own Soviet-deported and executed co-worker\u2013while filling two rail cars with his personal possessions.<\/span><\/p>\n

Again, we have the farmer Taoras, who in 1945 is forced to flee arrest and his first good job with servicemen in the American occupation zone simply because he has dared to equate Stalin with Hitler.<\/span><\/p>\n

Personally, I can\u2019t forget the brave grocery shop girl who\u2019s exiled to Siberia in 1941 after she dares tell the wives of two occupying Russian officers not to butt in line because there was plenty of food in Lithuania before the Soviets emptied store shelves.<\/span><\/p>\n

And there is one unforgettable anecdote about the Red Army\u2019s campaign of rape in conquered Germany. In it, a desperate Lithuanian \u201cDP\u201d mother protects herself and two young girls by screaming in broken Russian that she is not German but Lithuanian\u2013and can\u2019t wait to go home now that Lithuania is Soviet-\u201dliberated.\u201d Her desperate bluff works because it flatters the soldiers\u2019 view of themselves as benign liberators even in the act of rape.<\/span><\/p>\n

Little Lithuania in the\u00a0<\/span>Displaced Persons Camps<\/strong><\/p>\n

Almost every refugee in this book recounts the dramatic flowering of Lithuanian culture and education\u2013including schools, drama troupes and choirs\u2013as soon as the refugees sort themselves into their own national groups within the system of post-war \u201cdisplaced persons\u201d camps.\u00a0<\/span>What is truly remarkable is that these feats of national and cultural assertiveness occurred literally as soon as the camps were organized.<\/span><\/p>\n

Lithuanian elementary and high schools and Lithuanian Scouts with hand-sewn uniforms were already appearing the same month that the war in Europe ended, in barracks where food was still scarce and shelter primitive.\u00a0<\/span>What could this be except Lithuania re-created by refugees united in a communal yearning to return home soon?<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"Certainly, Germany was not home, but the refugee camps there were an immediate collection point for those only recently exiled: the closest spot in time and space to home, where atomized individuals could reunite in a major expression of communal desire.<\/span><\/p>\n

Of course, it helped that so many of the exiles were leading Lithuanian academics, educators, and cultural figures. One can imagine them living and organizing by their wits in a place where they are not entitled to anything but the most basic sustenance\u2013and almost everything has been consumed by war.<\/span><\/p>\n

Yet educator Kavali\u016bnas tells us that a Lithuanian school already had been organized by May 10, 1945, in the Freiburg camp(s), and the same month, in T\u00fcbingen. He details the printing of one of the first Lithuanian grammar texts in Stuttgart in December 1945\u2014as well as the difficulty of obtaining paper, ink, and a functional printing press for the job. \u201cThe idea (of organizing schools in the camps, where hunger was a daily experience), was that returning to Lithuania in a short time, our children wouldn\u2019t have lost a year (of schooling).\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Joana Krutulien\u0117 recalls, \u201cAll of that activity was so vibrant, people were exceptionally creative.\u00a0<\/span>Having nothing, really, they were capable of doing, working, acting in concert\u2026 establishing schools\u2026 The artistic ensembles (choirs and drama groups) made us feel alive, united us in some way\u2026 Such a vital life, such a desire to survive, to be active.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Conflicted Views of the\u00a0<\/span>First Wave<\/strong><\/p>\n

It is also in the camps where many \u201cDPs\u201d have their first encounters with Lithuanian-Americans of, or descended from, \u2018first wave\u2019 immigration to the U.S. between 1880 and 1914.\u00a0 <\/span>Most of these helpful interventions by Lithuanian-American priests, Army translators, and common soldiers on the ground in postwar Germany are mentioned only in passing\u2014perhaps due to the condensed formats of these stories. <\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"Rather more is said by many of the same \u201cDPs,\u201d once in the United States, about \u201cfirst-wavers\u201d from a more primitive Lithuania who don\u2019t understand them or their more advanced Lithuania. On another note, Taoras tells of \u201ca good-hearted man of the old emigration\u201d who helps him advance at work in Chicago\u2013to the point where all the other \u201cfirst-wavers\u201d on the job are jealous of him. <\/span><\/p>\n

Yet almost every refugee in this collection ultimately is sponsored by a member or descendant of the Lithuanian \u201cfirst wave\u201d under the U.S. Displaced Persons Act of 1948, from which the shorthand \u201cDP\u201d derives. Krutuliene sums it up best when she says, \u201cI appreciate (those) Lithuanians\u2026so much because \u2026their heritage had survived\u2026When we got here, there was already something for us: there were parishes already, churches already.\u201d\u00a0 \u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Despite their uneasy relationships, \u201cDP\u201d (\u201csecond wave\u201d) immigrants do, indeed, build on the institutions of the first immigrants. Their tremendous achievements in creating dozens of new \u201cheritage\u201d schools, choirs, dance ensembles, Scout troops and summer camps are firmly anchored in decades-old Lithuanian-American parishes.\u00a0<\/span>And it\u2019s from these Catholic parishes in places of much older Lithuanian settlement, like Chicago, that the new immigrants promote the interwar spirit of the newly independent Lithuania cut short by the 1940 Soviet invasion\u2014cut short in their own lives by forced emigration. <\/span><\/p>\n

Starting Over in America<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

The first great flowering of Lithuanian national identity in the postwar \u201cDP\u201d camps (later echoed around the world) ended with the dismantling of the camps in the late 1940s.\u00a0<\/span>It was time for those who had united in creative, communal striving to re-start their lives on their own again from nothing but hard work\u2014in places much farther-flung and more foreign than Germany. <\/span><\/p>\n

In fact, as I watched the subjects in this book facing the end of the national revival they had created in the camps, it seemed to me the beginning of a second, even sadder diaspora. <\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"Certainly, the late 1940s campaign of resettlement from post-war Germany was preferable to any forced return to the Soviet-occupied homeland. However, in the short term, \u201cDP\u201d resettlement tore apart people who were coping with the daily dashing of their hopes to return home soon by living together in a substitute \u201cnational\u201d community. And rather than helping them preserve even the fragile solace of community, it instead dispersed them around the world. <\/span><\/p>\n

In resettlement, the \u201cDPs\u201d were buffeted by powerful centrifugal forces, not just globally in diaspora across multiple host nations, but also locally in search of work, career, and affordable housing. With no equivalent to their immediate, on-the-ground national \u201ccollection point\u201d in the camps of postwar Germany, refugees dispersed to the U.S., Canada, Australia, Great Britain, and South America were required to find or create their own new \u201ccollection points.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

Again, \u201cfirst-wave\u201d settlement played a critical role\u2014reuniting \u201cDPs\u201d in cities like Chicago where their immigration sponsors were clustered. Soon, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, and Toronto were pulling away \u201cDPs\u201d from more remote places of resettlement with their enhanced opportunities for living a \u201cLithuanian life.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

The chance to re-form their lost community in places of earlier Lithuanian settlement did not solve all the \u201cDP\u2019s\u201d immediate problems.\u00a0<\/span>But it did provide an immediate base for receiving and organizing crucial self-help.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

The survival demands of physically taxing blue-collar work, further education and training in night school, and raising children remained major drains on the new immigrants\u2019 time and energy for decades.\u00a0<\/span>Yet because their parting with Lithuania had been conditional, driven by survival, with the intent to \u201cbe back soon,\u201d those who otherwise would have lived out their lives happily in a free Lithuania were soon re-creating \u201cLittle Lithuanias\u201d all over the world. <\/span><\/p>\n

Lithuania\u2019s \u2018Greatest Generation\u2019<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know if this makes the \u201cDPs\u201d Lithuania\u2019s \u201cGreatest Generation\u201d alongside tens of thousands of their peers who stayed behind and died fighting the Soviets as partisans. But I fully understand the impulse to consider them such because of their enduring devotion to the survival of a free Lithuania and their many sacrifices in that cause.\u00a0<\/span>Even in their later years, after decades of hard work and struggle in the U.S., the Lithuanians in this collection\u2014just like my retired factory worker father\u2013are still dedicated to helping their beloved homeland.<\/span><\/p>\n

Despite her personal losses and drastic uprooting as a young woman, Krutuliene muses, \u201cIt\u2019s good that a part of us is here in immigration\u201d because of the ability to financially support relatives back home\u2013and from 1948-1991 to agitate for independence in ways impossible inside the U.S.S.R.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"Petras Aleksa recalls, \u201cMy idea (after immigrating) wasn\u2019t to have a job or money\u2014it was important to make my own contribution to Lithuania.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Damusis, a chemist on the verge of giving his homeland a cement industry at the time it lost independence, describes how advancing Lithuania through one\u2019s highest educational and professional potential \u201cwas a rallying cry, and not just for me\u2026Everyone (in the \u201cDP\u201d generation), no matter what they did, made something good of it (for Lithuania.) Twenty-two years of independence provided the impetus for this.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Kavaliunas, the lifelong educator, concludes, \u201c20 years of independence (1918-1940) imparted (so much) to Lithuanians, instilling in them the love of country\u2014this was the huge capital that they brought with them from Lithuania.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

First published in Lithuanian in 2014, We Thought We\u2019d Be Back Soon became available in English in 2017\u2013just in time for the 2018 centennial of the restored Lithuanian independence that began in 1918 and lasted until the Soviet invasion of 1940. <\/span><\/p>\n

There could hardly be a better time to hear the voices of that interwar generation forged in the heady patriotism, passion for education, and service to country that Lithuania\u2019s first independence in hundreds of years inspired.<\/span><\/p>\n

So many lives inspired by one great idea\u2026 So many lives that tragically could have been cut short, but in which, despite such long and traumatic displacement, a profound patriotism endured. \u00a0 \u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sandra Baksys. As traumatized survivors of three invasions of their homeland (Soviets in 1940, Nazis in 1941, and Soviets, again, in 1944), members of Lithuania\u2019s \u201cDP\u201d generation were famously tight-lipped about their World War II refugee experiences. Until my father Vince was in his 70s and 80s, I learned few details of his flight from …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":5266,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[206,204,122,135,70],"tags":[111],"class_list":["post-5277","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","","category-books","category-culture","category-diaspora","category-geography-regions","category-history-1900","tag-baksys-s"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.draugas.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5277","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.draugas.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.draugas.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.draugas.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.draugas.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5277"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.draugas.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5277\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5305,"href":"https:\/\/www.draugas.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5277\/revisions\/5305"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.draugas.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5266"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.draugas.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5277"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.draugas.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5277"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.draugas.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5277"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}