Anti-Soviet Partisans

Vilnius Book Fair 2024

~ Antanas Sileika

Tens of thousands crowded into the Litexpo conference centre for the Vilnius book fair, and a few hundred came into my interview with Jolanta Kryževičienė to hear about the translation of Some Unfinished Business, called  Nebaigti reikalai in Lithuanian.

The level of literary interest in this country is very high. Even a high school kid asked for help on how to work on one of my books.

I was asked by the Canadian embassy to interview Giller prize winner, Suzette Mayr as she passed through the book fair, and it was a great to talk to her about The Sleeping Car Porter.

A Visual Walk through a Few Scenes in Some Unfinished Business

~ Antanas Sileika

The novel is set in rural and urban Lithuania in the Soviet postwar era, and as a friend said to me, “Why don’t you show some of those sites?”

So here are visuals of some of the settings in the novel.

 

1) My young Martin, the protagonist of the novel, is a youth living in a remote village called Lynežeris in 1947, in the south of the country, not far from the Byelorussian border. It’s a poor place where people live by subsistence farming. Here is a photo of one of the finer houses, taken a few years ago.

 

2) After years in the Gulag, in 1956, Martin finds himself in the city of Vilnius, where he goes looking for a job while walking down a major thoroughfare, called Vilnius Street. Here’s a modern picture of that street, all touristy now, but rather crumbling back then.

 

3) Martin applies for a job in a strange place, St. George’s church, which had been turned into a book depository for rare and forbidden books in the Soviet period. Here are a few photos. First the exterior, and then three interior shots of the bookshelves.

 

 

 

 

4) Kostas, the former village teacher in Martin’s youth, later becomes a famous writer who has an office in the fine Writers’ Union building. It was a former urban mansion with a modest exterior, but with some opulent decorations in the interior, including a grand staircase which Kristina will mount with complicating outcomes.

 

5) Kristina was adopted as a girl after being found shell-shocked in the Rasu cemetery, a short distance outside the city gate of Vilnius. It is a rambling old cemetery that runs over a couple of hills and a valley. It’s a place that comes alive on All Souls’ eve when people light candles and visit the graves of their dead.

 

6) Martin will  have a basement apartment very close to the old food market, which continues to function to this day.

 

7) The Dawn Gate in the remnants of the old wall of Vilnius gets mentioned twice in the novel. First Martin and Kristina will simply go for a walk through the opening. Of the two photos, one shows the exterior and the other shows the interior, with the painting of Mary Mother of God behind a window on the second floor. Originally, another building stood outside the gate. Kostas describes this place going up in flames, as it really did near the end of  the second world war.

 

8) Martin and Kristina will go for a walk down to what used to be called the Youth Park in the Soviet era. It’s a place where he will reveal some of his past. They walk by a fountain with elephants, but this fountain no longer exists in what is now called the Bernardinų Park.

 

9) Feeling burdened by the past, Martin and Kristina will go to an illegal bar for drinks in the old Užupis neighbourhood. This place is now very fashionable, but it was run down in the Soviet period.

 

And here’s a shout-out to Richard Martin-Nielsen, the former attaché at the Canadian embassy office in Vilnius. He suggested I do this last spring, before he moved on to another posting in Belgium. It only took me six months or so to get to it! Thanks, Richard, and good luck with the new assignment.

Imagining Lyn Lake (Lynežeris)

~ Antanas Sileika

 

 

Lyn Lake is far from everywhere, deep in the forest in a place with no cell phone reception and very close to the Belarus border.

 

Lyn Lake House

Many unusual things have happened in this place, and my correspondent, Eirimas Martunass, whose father grew up here, has told me about some of them. I am drawn to this remote village because Kostas Kubilinskas, the Dr. Seuss of postwar Lithuania, taught in the elementary school while on an undercover mission to penetrate and betray the underground anti-Soviet resistance. Once he succeeded and murdered at least one man, he went on to write rhyming children’s poetry to great success.

Stories from this place are often tragic, but with a ironic twists of the kind Rod Serling might have imagined on The Twilight Zone.

I’m working on a new novel inspired by those events, with a working title of  Skylark and Badger, the code names of the two protagonists..

But as I work toward the story, I discard my earlier versions of it. Here is one version, which introduces us to the rhyming assassin, and then goes back to tell a story of three boys stopping a Nazi transport train inspired by an incident that Eirimas told me. The photo below is of the house that served as a schoolhouse in Lyn Lake almost seventy years ago. The barely visible star of David suggests that Jews once lived in this house, but they were long gone from living memory well before The Holocaust.

 

Lyn Lake Window

 

 

 

Chapter Two – The Secret – 1947

 

 

A man with a terrible secret sat under a broad old oak tree overlooking Lyn Lake. The village lay behind him. He had thick, wavy hair and a widow’s peak over a high forehead, and he wore a very long, thin raincoat, even though it was only September and the weather was still fine. He was always conscious of his effect, even here in this godforsaken village where the locals considered him peculiar rather than artistic, as he intended. Beside him were a pipe and a half bottle of homemade vodka, namine in the local language, which he sipped on regularly throughout the late afternoon and into the evening. He had a bad relationship with alcohol, but it was unclear if he drank because of his problems, or if his drinking was just one of the many threads that would snare him.

He sat with his back against the tree and a scribbler on his knees. He wrote lines tightly packed together because there was a shortage of paper after the war, and just about everything else. But what was he writing on those pages? Poetry, he said to anyone who asked, and he occasionally amused the children in the country school where he worked as a teacher by reading them rhyming children’s stories. Those stories would make him famous one day, but at a price.

His name was Kostas Kubilinskas, and Kostas did not like teaching. He was made for better things, but he needed to survive somehow and for the time being he taught all four grades in a one-room village school.

The village might as well have been nowhere for its remoteness.

The nationality of the village and its surroundings depended on the decade. Lyn Lake lay on shifting ground, like those small floating islands that drift from one bank to another in marshy waters. Different rulers called it by different names. Within the last fifty years, it had been part of Czarist Russia, then Germany, then Poland, then Germany again, then Belarus, then Lithuania and finally now, in 1947, the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic. The villagers spoke Lithuanian among themselves, and reluctantly learned whatever language the current government used to rule them.

The closest town of Marcinkonys was twelve kilometers away over a forest lane. The villagers were very far from all governments and wished to be left alone, but the governments and their armies came to them, whether the villagers liked them or not. Usually not.

The earth was terribly sandy and had a tendency to blow away before the miserable harvests of rye, buckwheat, potatoes and other vegetables could be gathered, and the cows were thin from eating poor grass in the forest meadows. The pine forests around the village were massive in this part of Europe. Most of the land was not worth farming, yet some kind of living could be made by gathering the meager harvests, picking berries or mushrooms, selling wood, and catching fish from Lyn Lake. But only if the government requisitions were not too high – if the men were not taken away for forced labour by the various passing armies – or if the men and women were not imprisoned, deported, or killed in any of the ingenious ways that fate had of bringing misfortune to the village.

Before the latest war, there had not been any Jews in the village for a long, long time, and that was another sign of the poverty of the place because the Jews were the ones who ran the stores in this part of the world. Reportedly, the one Jewish family that had tried to live in the place in the previous century left because they could not make a living by running a tavern. The village schoolhouse, just one end of a log house considered big by local standards, had carved wooden decorations along the lintels above the windows, and among them, if one looked carefully, one could see small stars of David. Perhaps the schoolhouse had once been the Jewish tavern. No one was sure any more. Many things were forgotten.

The villagers had rights to certain parts of the lake, where they set their nets for fish. Only children ever tried to fish with rods, which could bring in one fish at a time, but a net, if you were lucky, could bring in many. Lyn was the local name for the most abundant fish, otherwise called Tench in English, cousins of the homely carp. Slippery as eels, they seemed to repopulate the lake for all the intensive fishing, so there was always hope of catching more.

 

Chapter Three – A Side of Bacon – 1943

 Lyn Lake Cemetery

Three of boys crouched behind a bush on the far side of Lyn Lake, hiding from their parents, who had no patience for the indolence of their sons. Parents would force the boys to hoe gardens, or drive the geese away from planted fields, or labour at the practically endless chore of chopping wood for the winter. Their parents were merciless taskmasters, driving all the children to make themselves useful. But for the boys, it was a summer’s day that deserved devotion to the promise it held.

They were barefoot and dressed in homespun linen shirts and pants. In the midday heat, the mosquitos were too sluggish to attack, but the flies buzzed about their ears and bit them furiously. Young Vladas wished he had a long tail so he could swat them without using his hands.

“You’re a liar,” said Vladas.

“It’s true, I tell you. I read it in a book.”

“What book?”

“I don’t have it anymore.”

Books were not exactly rare in the village, but they weren’t common either, and Vladas was sure he would have seen the book if it was around. He was skeptical of his friend, Almis, who spoke so confidently that half the time you believed his lies. Squatting with them was Dovas, who said nothing, and didn’t even swat at the fly on his ear. Dovas rarely said anything of interest and half the time you didn’t know if he understood what you were saying, but he had a knack for finding good fishing spots and he would defend you in a fight, so he was not much trouble to have around. He was almost as good as a dog, but he wouldn’t fetch.

“You get me some grease, and I’ll prove it,” said Almis.

“Where am I going to get grease?”

“Butter, then.”

“It’s hot. The butter would melt.”

Almis had read that if you greased the rails of train tracks, the engine wheels would spin uselessly and the train would be halted. Vladas loved the idea of stopping a locomotive with a handful of grease. He wanted to test the proposition.

“Wait here,” said Vladas.

The boy went back to his parents’ house.

The village had not changed much in a hundred years. It was made up of three dozen wooden houses on either side of a sandy road, and the fields that belonged to those houses were scattered across a few kilometers, a field here, a meadow there. If Vladas was in luck, his parents and older brothers and sister would be out in the fields with only his grandmother in the house, watching his younger brother. He found her alone by the window, stitching a shirt as the little boy played out front in the yard.

Valdas’s grandmother wore a kerchief over her hair and the shapeless uniform of old women, a sweater even in the heat of the day and a long, dark dress and wooden clogs on her feet. She seemed very old to him. She looked at him with her pale eyes.

“Why aren’t you out with your parents?” she asked.

She expected him to be working.

“The boys told me about a lake a few kilometers away. They said you can see the fish jumping there. I want to put in a line.”

She sighed for the sake of his parents, who needed all the help they could get, but nodded. She understood boys were not like horses that could be worked all day long.

“Take something to eat,” she said, and she didn’t seem to notice when he cut a very thick piece of smoked bacon off one of the sides hanging in the larder, as well as two thick slices of black bread. He wrapped them both in a linen tea towel.

“Bring home a lot of fish,” she said, and she muttered a few words and waved her fingers at him. He wasn’t sure if she had said a prayer or cast a spell. There didn’t seem to be much difference between the two of them anyway.

He ran back to where the other two boys waited for him and showed them what he had in the towel.

“Let’s go.”

The closest train tracks ran past Marcikonys, a real town of over a thousand people, and twelve kilometers away by the forest road, but if they cut through the forest they could lose a few kilometers. They knew all the forest paths because villagers fanned out after rainfalls to gather mushrooms, which could be dried and sold, or to gather blueberries, lingonberries or cranberries. These were not exactly recreational activities because their families depended on these foods to survive, but it was the kind of work that came close to play. In the forest, they would sometimes see hare or deer or wild boar. They occasionally found beehives and smoked them to steal the honey.

Now, in the intense heat of the summer, the forest was practically silent except for the buzz of flies that followed them from home. The trees were very tall and the branches very high and there was little underbrush. They walked among these columns as though through a cathedral with a green canopy. You could see a long way into the forest until the trees seemed to move together in the distance and became a wall. The threesome walked across gray mosses that crunched under their feet and they sometimes stooped to pick a few lingonberries hanging under the green, leathery leaves on low stems. Without sugar, the lingonberries were tart, but they helped to take off the boys’ thirst because they had left without thinking of taking a bottle of water.

Then Dovas found a rivulet without being asked, and they stooped and drank some water with cupped hands, and splashed their hair and shirts to keep themselves cool. The pound of bacon was slippery and sweating and it leaked through the cloth Vladas had wrapped around it. They ate a little of the bread, which had absorbed some of the fat, and then drank more water and went on.

The Germans had ruled the country for two years, but there were not many of them on the ground except at the infirmary back at the village. Lyn Lake was so far off the beaten track that there was not much danger to the Germans, not yet, and so their wounded rested there behind a palisade until they were well enough to go back into battle. There were more Germans at Marcinkonys because the railway ran through there, and the town had once held many Jews until they were rounded up. A couple of years earlier, when the Germans and their local helpers began to shoot them, many of the Jews had escaped and wandered through these woods, some to be recaptured, some to join the Red Partisans, and a very few to be hidden away for a while.

The boys picked their way through the green and grey mosses. The grey ones crumbled underfoot in the heat of the day, but in the morning and by night they were soft. Shoes were expensive, bast slippers too fragile, and clogs unwieldy in the forest. They walked barefoot on soles hardened by rubbing up against the earth, but the boys still needed to be watchful of what they were stepping on. A sharp, upturned branch could pierce their flesh and a bad cut was dangerous for a countryside without medicine for any but soldiers in the army.

Their shirts were wet with sweat by the time they reached the track on a gentle rise outside the Marcinkonys. It was dangerous to be seen near the rail bed because Red partisans out of nearby Byelorussia sometimes blew up the rails or fired on the trains. But there weren’t enough German soldiers to guard all the lines and the boys saw no railway workers, or indeed any other suspicious adults.

The rails were hot to the touch in the afternoon sun. The bacon itself, mostly fat and very little lean, was sweating as hard as the boys, and it bled fat easily as the threesome worked along one hundred meters of rise, rubbing and rubbing the bacon on the hot rail. Then they stopped to look back. One rail now glistened more than the other, and so Almis took over from Vladas and he rubbed the other rail down to where they had begun with the first.

Not much of the bacon remained except for the thin layer of lean meat. They walked back fifty metres from the rail bed and found a place where the line was visible through a gap in the bushes. Then they sat in the shade and waited.

“When is the next train going to come?” asked Dovas.

The other two boys looked at him, surprised to hear him speak. Dovas never seemed to have a sense of time, except in a general way.

Vladas looked at Almis, who shrugged his shoulders. None of them knew about schedules. It was like fishing. The fish bit or they did not. The train would come, or it wouldn’t. They would wait and see.

Vladas used a pocketknife to scrape the metallic layer off the surface of the bacon that they had rubbed on the rails, and then he cut the meat thinly and laid it on what remained of their bread. They knew it would make them thirsty, but they were hungry and could not resist. This was how country people ate their bacon – sliced and raw off the side, or cooked if a pan was handy. But none was.

They watched and waited, and even from that distance they could see many flies had landed on the rails. Vladas hoped they would not lick away the grease before the train arrived. They watched the bare land by the tracks, and nothing happened for a long time. The sun swung right over the tracks and they glinted, bright and painful to look at. Finally they heard the chugging of the locomotive, coming from the southwest, which was very good because the train would have to make it up the rise rather than come down it. The boys rose up on their haunches, three pairs of eyes above a mass of bushes, and they waited as the chugging grew nearer. Soon the plume of smoke appeared above the tree line.

It was a German supply train, loaded with materiel for the army fighting the Reds at the Battle of Smolensk hundreds of kilometers away to the east. An armored car with a machine gun turret guarded the train. The cars were many and heavily loaded and moving slowly as the engine strained forward like a weary horse with an excessive load. And like horses’ hooves that struggled up a wet hill, the wheels of the engine did indeed begin to slip as they came upon the greased rails. The train slowed as the iron wheels turned but failed to make it up the rise.

For a moment the train was still as the wheels spun madly, and then the engineer disengaged the drive and the wheels stopped turning.

Vladas and Almis hugged each other and would have shouted for joy, but Dovas pushed them down low and put his finger to his lips. Soldiers were getting off the train, and they held their rifles at the ready. The bushes where the boys were hidden were not that far away from the soldiers. If the men chose to fan out toward the forest, the boys would be found.

But the soldiers on the train did not go far. They did not want to expose themselves on the open grass beside the track where Red partisans might be waiting to pick them off. Or even worse, the partisans might intend to blow up the train and storm it afterward. Both the boys in the bushes and the young German soldiers were afraid, and rightly so. Fear was common in that country, and the only way to fight it was to carry on, to laugh if possible when things did not turn out as badly as they might have. But it was easier to think that way after the danger was over.

The men checked under the train for charges, and found none. At an order from an unseen commander, the soldiers stepped back up on the steps of the train and they held their positions there. The engineer engaged the gears and the train went into reverse, helped by the falling grade. The engine pulled back to the place before which the rails were greased. Two soldiers came out with buckets and spades, and another pair came out with them as guards. They went a little way away from the rail bed, and dug the sand that lay under all the vegetation in this part of the country. And then this terrified work party walked out to the greased rails to sprinkle sand on them while the guards kept watch.

The victory of boys over men, of young villagers in homespun clothes over the industrial and military might of Nazi Germany brought unbearable joy to the hearts of the boys. How was it possible to celebrate in silence? It was not even Dovas, the slightly slow, otherworldly boy who betrayed them, but Almis, who had told the other boys about greasing the rails and was now vindicated.

“Hah!” he said, and not even very loudly, but as it turned out, loudly enough. Had the work party still been digging sand, the sound of their spades against the earth might have covered the noise, but they were already sprinkling sand on the rails. One of the guards looked to where the boys were hiding and pointed and then brought up his automatic and fired in their direction.

Other automatics joined in from the steps of the cars and after a moment the heavy machine gun atop the armored car joined in. Heavy firing is often called “withering”, and in this case it proved to be just that, tearing apart bushes, bringing down branches and scattering thousands of leaves in premature autumn.

The boys ran swiftly, like rabbits, zigzagging and keeping their heads low. The soldiers had not seen anything specific, so their firing was wild, but still it struck dangerously close by, throwing up sand near the boys’ feet and cracking branches right beside them. A bullet could hit them at any moment.

But none did.

Soon the firing stopped because no commander could afford to waste ammunition on a vague enemy who did not fire back. Yet the joy in the boys’ hearts had turned to fear. They continued to run as if the soldiers were right behind them. They were wet with sweat, and the mosquitos came out and descended on them as they ran. But still they flew, not looking where they put their feet, and soon they were bleeding from them. Dovas was faster than the other two and they lost sight of him, and although Vladas was faster than Almis, he ran near him because it would have been too terrible to flee through the forest alone. So many sharp things cut his feet that he did not keep track of them.

At the village they separated, and then each ran into his own house. At Vladas’s place the whole family rose in alarm as he threw himself into the room where the family sat together at the dinner table. His hair was wild and his face was scratched and bleeding and the blood ran from his feet, staining the wooden floor. Mother and father seized the boy, whose eyes were wild, but they could not get anything out of him, breathless and fearful as he was. They stripped his sweaty clothes off him and his grandmother dabbed at the scratches on his face and hands as his mother washed his feet and picked the slivers out of them, and then bound them in cloths. They sat him up in bed and gave him birch sap to drink, and toward evening he was well enough to tell his parents what had happened.

His father pulled him out of bed over the protests of his mother and grandmother, and turned him and whipped his buttocks with a switch while pouring out a short, breathless speech.

“They could have killed you. Do you understand? And you would only have gotten what you deserved. And do you know what the Germans do to villages that have attacked them? They burn them down and shoot many men and sometimes whole families. You idiots could have brought them down on us and you could have killed your mother as well as killing yourselves.”

His grandmother stayed his father’s hand.

“Look at his foot,” she said. His left was swollen and beginning to discolour. She unwrapped the foot and brought a candle nearby and searched until she found a double pin-prick.

“He’s been bitten by an adder,” she said. His mother fell on her knees to pray. His father threw down the switch and went out to find the folk doctor. The two women watched as the leg swelled up and the boy began to whimper in pain. They put cool clothes on his forehead, but he pushed them away. After a while, his father returned with water over which the folk doctor had said some words. They rubbed his leg down with this water and waited.

Almis walked about the village with his chest puffed out. He had been right and now everyone knew it. He stayed away from Vladas’s house in case his parents blamed him. Almis received many admonishments from other adults, but he was a hero among the boys his own age.

No one thought much about Dovas because the boy appeared and disappeared at will, and no one ever went looking for him in the house where his father was a drunkard and his mother an anxious, sickly wife. He had told his own father nothing, but word eventually got out. When Dovas’s father came after him with the belt, the boy fled across the village and in his haste, forgot about an unused well in a tumbledown farmstead, where he fell in and drowned before anyone discovered where he was. They only found him two days later.

 

Publishing in Two Worlds

~ Antanas Sileika

Most of my posts have to do with history and the writing process, but I wanted to comment on appearing in translation in Lithuania, where I was keynote at a bookfair on the publication of the Lithuanian translation of my last novel, Underground., called Pogrindis in Lithuanian.

The Crowds at the Vilnius Book Fair

If you are translated into a language you do not know, you simply accept the fact with no real  knowledge of what the reception was like. This was the case with my book translated into Chinese. But I since I have enough Lithuanian to speak it and read it, I had insight into a remarkably literary culture there.

This is a Full House to Hear about a Book of Aphorisms

Sixty thousand people attend the book fair in Lithuania – whole families come with children. The cabbie who drove there talked about how much he loved books, and as physical objects, and thus not as ebooks.

There were dozens of presentations, and many of them made the newspapers. In my own presentation, there was seating for maybe three hundred people, and it was standing room only with a crowd at the door.

The reception to the novel was outstanding, with many newspaper, television, and radio review and interviews (for links, see my appearances page, but only if you have the language) and a whole print run sold out two days into the fair.  As well, the cultural attaches of some of the embassies picked me up.

Father and Son waited Forty Minutes to Get Their Book Signed

My literary world is a Canadian, and to a smaller extent, an English language one, so it was fascinating to see how another culture reacts to books.

Since Underground is a historical novel, based on the postwar anti-Soviet resistance, much of the interest lay in the subject matter, which is unexplored in fiction in Lithuania.

Sadly, one of the people whose personal history is connected to the subject matter reproached me in print for dealing with history as fiction. You could say this is just a misunderstanding of form, but I can also understand how you might think that your own story belongs to you, and a fictional approach might seem startling.

I’ll be in London to do a talk at the Lithuanian embassy on the occasion of the bookfair there in April.

As to the rest of my work, I am deeply into the new novel, tentatively titled Provisionally Yours, and will likely have a first draft done by the summer. I intend to finish it off at a summer house we have rented very close to the summer house used by Thomas Mann in the thirties on the Curonian Spit. that’s a very unusual place, with villages buried in sands and a lagoon on one side and the Baltic on the other.

Anne Applebaums’ Iron Curtain

~ Antanas Sileika

The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944 – 1956

Anne Applebaum

Anne Applebaum was in Toronto recently to speak about her excellent new book in a Donner Lecture series. Keith Lowe, in his Savage Continent, predicted that there is far more to understand about the destruction in Eastern Europe, and now, months after that statement, we have Applebaum’s book, covering some of the same territory as Lowe and to a certain extent, that of Timothy Snyder and Tony Judt before her.

The great strength of this history is the detailed description of how the communists functioned to destroy civil society in the lands they occupied, flying in Soviet-trained specialists to take control of local radio stations first. Stalin had a sense that radio was the most important tool in taking control of a country, but it was only a first step.

The war had habituated the occupied territories to violence. In Poland, whole buildings of inhabitants were arrested. In Hungary, a man pulling his two children in a cart was arrested and the children left on the street.

Czeslaw Milosz is often quoted on this matter of violence: “The man in the East cannot take Americans (or other westerners) seriously because they have not undergone the same experiences. Their resultant lack of imagination is appalling.”

What Milosz meant was that in the East, one turned away from signs of violence and distress to preserve oneself, while those in the West could not understand the lack of empathy that might stop a man from going to the aid of another being treated unjustly.

The violence of the war had left a vacuum, and into this vacuum came the communists, first with their army and then control of the radio. Some enthusiasts saw this as a good thing, if only because it brought order.

But what order!

Applebaum says the red army’s arrival is rarely remembered as pure liberation  – it is remembered as the beginning of a new occupation. I imagine that could not have been true for Jews, for whom the Soviets were the only hope of liberation in the East, no matter how bad their regime. At least they were not bent on the annihilation of a whole people. The Reds also freed non-Jewish prisoners in camps such as Stutthof.

But the rapacity of the Red army has been documented thoroughly, and Alpplebaum reminds us that in the iconic photo of a Soviet soldier raising a red flag above the Berlin Reichstag, the photo needed to be doctored to hide the several watches the soldiers were wearing on their arms.

Chillingly, Moscow viewed all inhabitants of the new Western territories as potential subversives, so the vice of repression was applied slowly, but relentlessly.

Among banned groups were hiking clubs and charities. The intention was to create a new type of person who was not even capable of imagining alternatives to the Soviet model.

Interestingly, Applebaum raises the question of why more people did not resist. I do wonder if this isn’t a slight application of Milosz’s claim that Westerners cannot understand (although Applebaum is practically an Easterner). Of course one does not resist when the price of resistance is so high. She does mention that resistance (and repression) carried on more intensively in the Baltics and Ukraine, but these areas are outside the scope of her book, which focuses on Poland, East Germany, and Hungary.

Sadly, I might add. These forgotten Baltic and other countries were covered to a certain extent by Timothy Snyder in Bloodlands, but they are difficult for most Westerners to understand because they did not have country status after the war. They were absorbed right into the Soviet Union. Their histories remain absorbed to this day. The multilingual Timothy Snyder explained that Lithuanian is too hard to learn (to say nothing of Estonian and Latvian) and as a result, histories of these places have not been written from the point of view of the west.

Applebaum gives plenty of detail in her work about the erasure of civil society (and even the reduction of free time, which now had to be devoted to partry-approved lectures, memorials, and marches). But the happy ending, if one can call it that, is that resistance remained muted, but present, at least in people’s minds, and it became active as Soviet power began to diminish due to the failure of communist economics.

The reaction to Applebaum’s book has been interesting. Timothy Snyder was praised by most reviewers, but as Adam Gopnik pointed out in an article in The New Yorker, some people were offended by his book because it could be used by ultraconservatives to diminish the importance of the narrative of the Holocaust. Snyder has denied this and claimed he simply lays out the facts of what happened. But in extremist circles I have heard echoes from, Snyder’s work was called “disgraceful”.

I couldn’t agree less.

In these various blog posts, I have discussed the idea of multiple narratives coming out of WW2 and the postwar era, but instead a kind of war of narratives has gone on. I still see claims that attempts to document the crimes of the Soviets are a cover to mask the crimes of Nazis and their collaborators. But when I approached Applebaum after the talk, and asked her about this claim, she said it has now become a “fringe view”.

We do tend to look at these stories from a point of view or fixed position, if we have one. Most westerners do not because they are ignorant of what happened in the East, but even so, the New Yorker review of Applebaum’s book is an example of argument from a position.

One of reviewer Louis Menand’s main questions is whether the United States could have done something about the crimes of the Soviets.

Unrealistic though the proposition may have been, most in the East thought so. The lack of interest in the West is still known as “the great betrayal”.

Menand is interested in the belief that Stalin had no grand plans to invade the west and the Soviet military might was often exaggerated by the United States. A subtext here is that the right-wingers in the West were exaggerating for their own motives. He also ads that Soviets really believed in their ideology, but can that be any sort of excuse? The Nazis believed in their ideology too.

Menand also says that USA could not do anything in any case, and that its goal was to destroy Germany, not save Poland.

But Poland did have treaties with England and France. What were their responsibilities?

Menand writes: “What happened on one side of the wall stayed on that side of the wall. It had no effect on the other side of the wall. Few officials in the West really wanted to se the iron curtain lifted”

That sounds like betrayal to me.

To his credit, Menand adds that Alpplebaum has depicted the human price. And what a human price!

When it comes to history, God is in the details. Alpplebaum has laid out the details in a book less horrific than Timothy Snyder’s but no less illuminating.

Lithuanian Translation Appears

~ Antanas Sileika

The Lithuanian translation of Underground, called Pogrindis, appeared in Lithuania in 2013.  Here’s a link to an article about the novel’s background (in Lithuanian) as well as an interview with Tomas Donela, who has optioned the film rights. As for the novel itself, it’s available from the publisher at the link here.

For details of the book fair, see my blog post. Also her are a few more links to Lithuanian reviews and profiles: 1, 2, and a third one here. (If the last link doesn’t work, as mine is having trouble, you can find the review at Literatura ir Menas).

Here’s a Lithuanian television interview I did for an operation called “Alchemija.”

Keith Lowe’s Savage Continent

~ Antanas Sileika

While I am deep in source material from the 1920’s for my current novel, I couldn’t help picking up Keith Lowe’s fascinating new history that sheds more light on the postwar era in Europe. It joins the late Tony Judt, Norman Davies, and Timothy Snyder’s deep and fresh analyses of the postwar period, continuing to dispel the myth that the war ended on May 8, 1945.

Lowe is particularly interested in the scale of the wreckage cause by the second world war, including the complete destruction of cites such as Warsaw, the subsequent vengeance dealt out to various parties, the wholesale movement of millions of people (causing millions more deaths), the wholesale rape of women, local insurgencies and ongoing local wars that lasted right into the fifties in places such as Greece and Lithuania.

Deaths numbered over 35 million, the same number as the entire population of Poland and close to that of France.

Jew suffered the greatest percentage losses of anyone, and those who survived and returned often found themselves the objects of new local pogroms that caused them to flee. But even before they did, they noted the complete absence of their brethren on their return. It was not unusual for a member of an extended family of dozens to find himself or herself the sole survivor and thus alive in a social vacuum.

Many millions of people were driven out of ancestral homes, most numerously the Germans, who were forced out of Prussia and the Eastern parts of Germany, many, many dying along the way. Much has recently been written about the massive rapes soldiers of the Red Army in occupied territory, so this is not exactly fresh news, but it is put in the context of many other outrages and forced population movements, among them of Poles and Ukrainians. At the end of the war in n much of Europe, women outnumbered men and were doomed to spinsterhood and whole gangs of orphans wandered the continent.

Moral destruction was great in brutalized societies, and famine added edge so that large numbers of women prostituted themselves for something to eat for themselves or their children.

Perceived collaborators were killed or humiliated, women stripped of clothing and beaten. One of them defended herself by declaring that her heart belonged to France, but her vagina belonged to her alone.

The devastation and postwar horror was worse the farther East one went. There, the Germans had considered most of the populations subhuman, and thus there were policies, as Timothy Snyder pointed out, of intentional starvation, which would have been far worse had the Germans won

Interestingly, there is a detailed vignette of the underground postwar resistance in Lithuania, where my last novel, Underground, was set. Lowe describes a pitched battle in Kalniskis between partisans and Reds, where the historical inspiration for Elena in my novel was killed while firing a machine gun. She had previously taken part in the assassination of five communist collaborators in her apartment in Marijampole.

The partisan resistance remains controversial; some polemicists see them as stranded fascists and the 135,000 deported to Siberia in the postwar period as their supporters (an outrageous comment made on a book review page of Ellen Cassady’s book, We Are Here). More seriously, some argued that a war against the Reds and their local collaborators was a hopeless waste of human life, but Lowe says that the memory of that resistance helped spur the drive for independence in the eighties.

To hate one’s neighbours became entirely rational in the postwar era, and our understanding of the war and that time, according to Lowe, is woefully incomplete. Conflicts over race, nationality, and politics went on for months and years after the war. The communists, and to a certain extent the former allies, saw this chaos as an opportunity to push forward their agendas, leading to the cold war.

As Timothy Snyder pointed out, national myths tend to obfuscate rather than illuminate the big picture. National myths create martyrs, but they do so in the absence of the story of other martyrs in the big picture. These myths often conflict with others’ myths.

To quote Lowe, “The immediate postwar period has been routinely neglected, misremembered and misused by all of us.”

But that is changing, and Lowe’s book is one of the spate of new histories that is helping to open up our understanding of what happened during the European war and in its aftermath.

Film Option

~ Antanas Sileika

I am so pleased to have sold the option to Underground

to Tomas Donela of Donelos Studija.

I saw his film, Atsisveikinimas, in the European festival that played in Toronto last fall, and was particularly impressed by the cinematography.

It would be great to see this project come together.

 

Update: May 31, 2016:

The Lithuanian Ministry of Culture awarded twenty-eight thousand Euros for development, so a few years later, this project is still alive.

Vanished Kingdoms, by Norman Davies

~ Antanas Sileika

The English/Welsh historian, Norman Davies, first became widely known with his God’s Playground, a history of Poland, and then shot to wide acclaim with Europe, in 1998, perhaps the first popular history book to consider Central and Eastern Europe as very important parts of the narrative of that place. Up until then, Europe was loosely thought of as the western part, at least by westerners.

What was ground-breaking in Davies was further enlarged upon by the late Tony Judt in Postwar in 2005, and more recently by the brilliant Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder in 2010. In other words, the idea of Europe became bigger through these books and the story of the east became important, or in the case of Snyder’s book, central to the story being told.

Norman Davies’s latest book, Vanished Kingdoms, is dedicated to “those whom historians tend to forget”, namely the peoples of kingdoms that have vanished from the earth. He says we should study them as well, for not to do so betrays a bias toward victors, while the stories of victors tell only one part of history.

Among the kingdoms he writes about, two stand out for me with my interest in Eastern Europe.

The first is a place he calls “Litva”, which at various times included Lithuania, Belorussia, Ukraine and even Poland. While the story of the rise and fall and reappearance of Lithuania has been told widely, Davies brings many new elements into the story. He writes vividly, for example, of the melancholy of the last Jagiellonian king, Zygmunt August (ruled 1548-72) who believed that after him would come the deluge (and it did, eventually). Davies writes interestingly about the scattering of the Metryka Litevska, the archive of the empire that was dispersed across Poland, Sweden, and Russia and made reconstruction of the history of that region so difficult.

The chapter on Prussia struck me as particularly fresh, because Davies, never one to accept western clichés, sets out to demolish the story of a militaristic, jackboot iron kingdom that got what it deserved. He points out that the Prussians were no more aggressive than the Russians in the first world war, and he goes into some detail about the annihilation of Prussia during and after WW2. Then, 2.2 million East Prussians were killed or deported, and more were forced out of West Prussia. Their melancholy fate, he says, was like that of Carthage – “They create a desert and call it peace.”

Timothy Snyder, in a review of this book in the Guardian, called it “romantic”. The story of vanished kingdoms does indeed smack of romantic melancholy, but sometimes that is just the right reaction to have.

Partisan Attack

~ Antanas Sileika

Just as I thought I was moving on to a new page in literary subject matter, the postwar partisan story has taken another turn with the launch of a fresh polemic against these underground resisters of Soviet occupation in Lithuania.

A Sharp Attack on the Postwar Anti-Soviet Partisans

A contentious new book has appeared in Lithuania, called A Memorial Book of the Victims of Partisan Terror (Partizanu Teroro Auku Atminimo Knyga).

The book has a trilingual introduction by Povilas Masilionis in which he attacks the partisans as murderers and terrorists. Most of the book consists of a list of civilians killed by partisans.

This book comes on the heels of an article by Jurgis Jurgelis comparing civilian killings carried out by pro-Soviet collaborators and anti-Soviet partisans (even my choice of words is fraught here – unavoidably so). Jurgelis suggests a sort of moral equivalency between the two.

On the other hand, Arvydas Anusauskas, member of the Seimas and former head of the Genocide Museum, says that the book is old propaganda reheated by Masiulionis, who, in the Soviet period, worked for the Central Committee of the Communist Party as a propaganda instructor and assistant director of the journal “The Comunist”.

Does pedigree matter? I think it must.

The introduction does reek of a polemic of the lowest sort, but even so, I have to sympathize with the numerous dead listed in the pages. For example, Donatas Glodenis is a thoughtful blogger in Lithuania, a man whose grandfather was killed by partisans (perhaps for agreeing to work in a position of responsibility in a state farm.) To see one’s grandfather memorialized must be moving and important (see his comments on the book launch).

Twenty years after Lithuania’s independence, the battle over history is not going away – it is heating up.

Dramatic Biographies Part Four – Jonas Zemaitis

~ Antanas Sileika

Partisan Leader Posthumously Named Lithuania’s Fourth President

Postage Stamp Commemorating Jonas Zemaitis

If the generation of Americans who fought in WW2 is considered the “The Greatest Generation” for its sense of sacrifice and courage, the same can be said out east, on the far side of Europe, where the suffering was far broader than it ever was in the west. In the west some died and others returned to the developing suburban dream, but in the east, some died, some kept on fighting, and the rest were hammered into dust for the mortar used to build the house of Communism.

One of Lithuania’s most famous members of this generation is Jonas Zemaitis, an anti-Soviet partisan fighter from 1944 to his execution in Moscow in ten years later. Zemaitis and many of his generation stayed behind when the Soviets returned for a new round of terror. Some were simply unlucky, a few may have been collaborators, but most were like Zemaitis – patriots who refused to leave their homes. Astonishingly, Moscow seemed on the verge of naming this underground opponent the new leader of Soviet Lithuania in 1953.

Son of a happy-go-lucky father in independent Lithuania, Jonas Zemaitis sought structure and stability by entering the Kaunas officers’ academy in 1926. He was a solid student who trained in the artillery, working his way up to the rank of captain and eventually being talented enough to be sent to France in the late thirties.

Zemaitis remained behind in Lithuania when the Soviets returned in 1944. The anti-Soviet partisan movement was glad to have him because many officers had been taken in the first wave of Soviet deportations and most of those who remained fled before the second Soviet occupation. The resistance needed men who knew military tactics, and they found their champion in Zemaitis.

Early partisan resistance was military in a traditional sense – the partisans took land and defended it. Zemaitis fought in pitched battles from fortified positions with dozens of partisans in the early stages of the fight in 1944 and 1945. But this was a losing proposition against vastly larger forces, and it became worse when the Soviets defeated Germany and could turn back to concentrate on pacifying their captured territories.

Zemaitis was lucky for a time, escaping in close calls again and again –  even his wife managed to escape from captivity by the NKVD.

But luck was not enough against superior forces. By1948, the country had tired of resistance and partisan numbers were down dramatically, from 30,000 at the beginning to perhaps 2,000. Increasingly, locals were betraying the partisans and occasionally feeding them sleeping mixtures or poisons. Notwithstanding these difficulties, the partisans united themselves under a single command with Zemaitis as their leader.

In 1950 they were still managing to produce an underground press and even received modest funding of a few hundred dollars from the Americans through Juozas Luksa, a partisan who had made it out to the west and returned.

The end of the game was clearly in sight when in 1951, Zemaitis suffered a stroke which partially paralyzed him. Allies were few and resources stretched thin. He could not shelter in a hospital or even a house, so he spent over a year in a bunker being served and nursed by women sympathetic to the partisan cause. But by then the whole movement had been compromised. Too many captured partisans gave in either to torture or pressure against their families or arguments about the inevitable socialist future, and these men infiltrated their former bands. Such was the case with Zemaitis, whose bunker location was revealed in 1953 by his right-hand man soon after his capture.

Zemaitis and the others were taken alive when the bunker was filled with sleeping gas.

So far, this is a story that is broadly the same as hundreds of others in that place and time. Where it changes is at the end.

In 1953, the murderous and paranoid Joseph Stalin died and his right-hand man, Lavrenty Beria, took over the Soviet Union. Today, Beria has a reputation as the most heartless of Stalin’s henchmen, and some believe he would have continued Stalin’s style of terror had he survived. Yet his actions at this juncture hint at the opposite. Beria was looking for accommodation with nationalist forces in both Lithuania and Ukraine. There are some hints that he even intended to put the partisan leaders in positions of power and discard the old Central Committee leaders who had ruled under Stalin’s regime in Lithuania and Ukraine.

After his capture in1953, Zemaitis was interrogated in Vilnius, but not tortured. This fact was a novelty under Beria’s new rules. Then Zemaitis was flown to Moscow where he met in person with Beria for an hour.

What did they say to one another? What was supposed to happen next? We’ll never know. Beria was arrested the next day and executed before the end of the year.

Whatever good this meant for the Soviet Union (Beria was known as a hard liner and his elimination eventually led to a thaw), it meant the opposite, a return to the old ways in Soviet Lithuania. Antanas Snieckus, the head of the Communist Party in Lithuania, was now secure in his place as he had been under Stalin. Zemaitis was returned to Lithuania by train and interrogated, again, without torture. Under interrogation, he sketched out the entire system of partisan resistance in Lithuania, which had crumbled by then.  At least one historian believes he did so to ensure a record of the resistance survived in KGB archives.

In is final statement, Zemaitis insisted that he believed his resistance to be lawful and the Lithuanian Soviet regime the product of an invading force. He said he regretted nothing. Sentenced to death, he was returned to Moscow where the verdict was carried out in 1954.

In 2009, the Lithuanian government declared that he represented the lawful extension of independent Lithuania, and posthumously declared him as the fourth president of the country.

Dramatic Biographies Part Three – Kostas Kubilinskas

~ Antanas Sileika

The story of Kostas Kubilinskas is something like an East European joke, and by that I mean it is a particularly gruesome story with tragicomic overtones.

Murderer and Children's Poet, Kostas Kubilinskas

Kostas Kulbilinskas died in 1962 and at the time he was one of the best-loved children’s writers in Lithuania. (I mentioned him in an earlier post about Lionginas Baliukevicius  – author of Diary of Partisan.) It turns out he is an excellent example of the type of writer described in Czeslaw Milosz’s Captive Mind, a writer who will do anything to get published. He was a man who became a murderer in order to earn the right to write children’s poetry.

Kubilinskas was born in 1923, one of four children in a poor family. Right from his youth he established himself as a poet of sorts by wining poetry prize at the age of fifteen. He was in high school during the first German occupation, and began to write satirical poems about Stalin and Jews (!). From the very first, it seems he tailored his writing to the current ruling regime. The problem would come when the regimes changed.

Kubilinskas had a knack for rhyme and wrote easily and quickly. Later in life, he was known as the kind of man who could compose rhymes at the printer’s if a magazine had an unexpected white space.

When the Soviets were approaching Lithuania for their second occupation, Kubilinskas decided to stay behind because he felt he was a poet above all and could not leave the land of his language. He imagined he might adapt to the regime by writing for its rulers.

At first this worked well. He joined the Communist Youth League and became one of the promising writers in the new writers’ union. But in 1946, he was identified as a German collaborator and removed from his post. He was unable to publish, and eventually ended up as a teacher in remote village in the south of Lithuania.

It must have felt like banishment to Kubilinskas, but it led to an interesting turn of events. Kubilinskas stood out as an intellectual in these surroundings, and intellectuals were rare and valuable in a land where one crop had been deported to Siberia, another died in the Holocaust, and a third fled before the invading Red Army in 1944. The local ant-Soviets could use a man like that because they lacked writers and intelligencia for their newspapers. Kubilinskas’s friend, Algirdas Skinkys, was in a similar position. Skinkys is almost a double of Kubilinskas, although a lesser double because less talented.

Kubilinskas had said to friends he would go to any lengths for the ability to publish poetry, and the contact with the partisans opened an opportunity for him to redeem himself. He wanted to leverage the partisan contact to gain bigger rewards than the resistance could offer him.

Not trusting the local MGB, Kubilinskas wrote to the chair of the Lithuanian Communist Party, Antanas Snieckus, and volunteered to infiltrate the anti-Soviet partisans. His file was handed over to a Vilnius MGB officer, and Kubilinskas was trained in firearms and deception.

His job was to find local partisan groups, infiltrate them, and assassinate the leaders or bring in troops to do the job if need be. Fearful for their safety, Kubilinskas and his friend Skinkys hesitated to commit murder until they were ordered to fulfill their tasks within the first weeks of 1949 or face the wrath of the MGB.

In a botch job that ended up turning out well for Kubilinskas, he and his friend shot a sleeping partisan in his bunker and then fled to Alytus, a provincial capital, where they summoned MGB soldiers to surround another bunker where several more partisans were killed in a firefight.

The botch occurred when Kubilinskas was identified while fleeing, and thus could no longer be used in other operations to infiltrate the partisans, who issued an execution order against him (which was never carried out).

The botch played to his advantage. Kubilinskas was free to publish as a poet, which he did, with great success. Although he never published much for adults, Kubilinskas became a roaring success as a children’s writer, producing many rhyming stories. He was the Doctor Seuss of Lithuania in the 1950’s.

But Kubilinskas was a drinker, whether because of a guilty conscience or natural tendency, and his alcoholism began to interfere with his work to such an extent that he was sent in 1962 to a sanitarium for alcoholics outside Moscow, where he died under mysterious circumstances, some say murdered by the KGB (the heir of the MGB) for being too talkative. He had lived only until the age of 39. His colleague in crime, Algirdas Skinkys, lived until 1970, reaching the age of 45. The latter, though, never achieved the fame of Kubilinskas.

It seems impossible to the modern western reader that a man so pliable to ruling regimes, and a murderer as well, should be capable of writing lasting poetry, all the less children’s poetry. Yet his choices reflect the reality of Eastern Europe where one had to select among bad choices. Kubilinskas made some of the worst of them.

This egotistical artist was the inspiration for the character called Rimantas in my novel, Underground, code-named Poe for his fondness for the American poet. I chose Poe as his code-name for the gruesome connotations we have for that writer.

What is the fate of the reputation of this murderer? For all his crimes, some readers in Lithuania continue to enjoy his children’s work. Public taste and public morality are two distinct realms, although there are few cases as extreme as that of Kostas Kubilinskas.

Eastern European jokes can be cruel indeed, and the life of Kostas Kubilinskas shows us a man who loved to write for children so very much that he helped murder to get the opportunity to do it.

Doctor Juozas Markulis – Code Named Eagle – Soviet Agent and Provocateur

~ Antanas Sileika

Lithuanian partisans captured by the MGB in the postwar period were sometimes turned into provocateurs or double agents – few could resist the intimidation and torture used against them in interrogations. Some collaborators were more thorough and enthusiastic in their work than others. Among them were Juozas Deksnys, described in earlier posts, and Algimantas Zaskevicius (reported to have contributed to the capture of 300 partisans).

Collaborator Markulis narrowly escaped execution by Juozas Luksa

But the most famous of them all was Dr. Juozas Markulis, who taught medicine at the university of Vilnius.

Markulis was born in the USA but returned to Lithuania to complete studies for the priesthood. He never took religious orders. He was handsome and attractive to women, and he shifted instead to officer training in the military and finally into medicine in 1940. He joined the LLA, an underground Lithuanian resistance organization in 1941.

The organization was smashed by the Soviets at the end of 1944, and its archives fell into their hands. Markulis may have been identified at this time – he certainly was turned at this time.

The partisan underground lacked intellectuals – many of the fighters were the children of farmers, and Markulis insinuated himself into a local regional partisan unit where he was much beloved and looked upon as a father figure.

Markulis had two strategies – to unify the partisans in the country and to convince them to move toward passive resistance, tactics that were beginning to work. He was convincing to the partisans and impressive to his MGB superiors, writing long and detailed reports that showed he had an excellent memory for detail.

Working under intense pressure, Markulis could not avoid making mistakes, and one of them was permitting the MGB to arrest Jonas Deksnys, who had been instructed by his brother to maintain ties with no one but Markulis.

Thus it became clear that Markulis was a collaborator and spy and Juozas Luksa himself went to Vilnius in 1947 to execute him, but Markulis escaped.

He lived in Leningrad until 1953, when the partisan movement had been destroyed, and then returned to teach at the University of Vilnius.

His motivations remain opaque. He died in 1988, just before Lithuania regained its independence. His legacy is a name synonymous with treachery – he is the Benedict Arnold of Lithuanian to those who know the story of the resistance to the Soviets.

New Review in the Literary Review of Canada

~ Antanas Sileika

Anna Porter has written a thorough and informative review of Underground in the LRC. What a relief to have someone familiar with “the other Europe” doing the writing.

You ccan see the review in the LRC itself or buy an online copy of the journal, but here are a couple of highlights:

… In an uncompromising novel, post-war Lithuania receives its due.

As for Antanas Sileika,…, he has written a tough, uncompromising book and brought those forgotten stories back to life.

Four Dramatic Biographies – Part One

~ Antanas Sileika

While I had intended to begin this season with an entry about Robert Heingartner and the shape of my novel in progress, I stumbled across some more partisan biographies while I was in Lithuania last summer and found them too good to remain unremarked upon.

The Source of Four Partisan Biographies

The four come from a book by Rokas Subačius called (in translation) Dramatic Biographies, detailing the lives of twenty-six Lithuanians during periods of first independence and three brutal occupations.

In a radio interview with Shelagh Rogers on CBC radio this fall, I said I keep going back to Lithuanian sources because the place has life stories with very high stakes.

Some of the four biographies provided source material for Underground.

The first life described is that of Juozas Vitkus, code-named Kazimieraitis, who was the head of the partisan region of southern Lithuania. Although he did not write about his own life, he was described in detail by Adolfas Ramanauskas, code-named Vanagas, whose biography inspired parts of Underground.

Before WW 1, Juozas Vitkus should have emigrated as a child to America where his father had gone to find work, but his mother became sick on the way and was held back in London and the children were sent to an orphanage. His father returned from America to round them all up and then went back to farm modestly in Lithuania instead of going on to the USA.

Delayed by the war, Vitkus entered high school in 1919 at the age of eighteen. Lithuania’s independence battles were still going on, and he joined the army and was trained as an officer, serving as a lieutenant in battles with the Poles. He trained as a military engineer in Belgium and visited the Paris World’s Fair of 1937. He was a lieutenant-colonel by 1940 during the first Soviet occupation, but was not deported to Siberia like so many officers at that time.

During the German occupation, unwilling to work in an army subservient to the Nazis, he went into civilian life, meanwhile helping to create the LLA, an underground military school in the resistance.

When the threat of Soviet return became real, the retreating Germans agreed to train and arm about a hundred potential underground resisters. While biographer Subacius does not go into detail on this point, one can see where the story of underground fighters as Nazi sympathizers arises. Some took training and weapons from the Germans (and some were undoubtedly collaborators). However, the majority of partisans, as we know, were simply young men, mostly from rural backgrounds, fearful of the returning Soviets and unwilling to join their army.

Vitkus could not easily withdraw before the approaching Soviets because he had five young children. But after their second arrival (the first was in 1940), he found it difficult to find work under the occupation itself because no one would give a former army officer a job. He finally found work in the remote southern countryside as a bookkeeper, apparently intending to stay legal but out of the spotlight and thus less liable to deportation from a provincial village.

However, the partisan resistance as forming around him, and he could see the lack of military training in these informal groups. Most of the higher officers had fled Lithuania or been imprisoned, and Vitkus joined the partisans with the intention of raising their military training. He was the highest ranking officer from the formerly independent army in the partisan movement.

At this moment it is worth standing back from the life for a moment and watching how history played havoc with the best-laid plans. Vitkus, who chose the code-name Kazimieraitis, had no intention of resisting at first, but he felt compelled to do something for the partisans in spite of the fact that his actions put his family and himself at risk.

One of his first tasks was to organize the resistance and to enforce discipline, in particular on some of the criminals who drifted into the partisan movement in the early days. At least seven of them received death sentences for excessive violence in the resistance.

Vitkus’s bunker was at the confluence of two small streams that did not freeze over the winter, and the only way to reach the bunker door without leaving footprints was to wade in the shallow waters with rubber boots on the way.

Vitkus met with Juozas Deksnys, a partisan stationed in Stockholm who came back into Lithuania to check out the local situation. With him, he hoped to set up ties to the international community and to get help for the resistance.

Vitkus also helped organize the seizure of the town of Merkine, dramatized in my novel. The intention was to assassinate local collaborators. In that action two hundred partisans attacked the town with great initial success, but significant losses as well. By 1948, incidentally, the 47 whose names Ramanauskas could remember were all dead.

Even in 1946, the noose was tightening. After the Merkine action, a captured partisan was tortured until he revealed Vitkus’s bunker. Although Vitkus was not caught, two other partisans were killed and their documents discovered, including Vitkus’s diary and a list of sixty supporters, who were subsequently arrested.

The partisans fought on, but the losses were great. Through 1945 through June of 1946, Vitkus lost 250 shot, 236 arrested, and 213 partisans who opted to take amnesty. Only 300 were left in his area.

After a massive partisan execution action against spies, the resulting MGB combing of the forests stumbled across Vitkus while he was washing his clothes by a stream. He defended himself with a pistol, wounding two soldiers, but was wounded in turn by a grenade and taken alive. The MGB did not know who they had. They beat him during interrogation, but he died of his wounds without giving out any information.

His body was dumped in the marketplace in village of Leipalingis and left there until the MGB discovered who they had killed. Then the body was taken away and buried in a place that remains unknown to this day.

When I was in Merkine again this summer, I visited the partisan monument where he and dozens of other fighters are commemorated. It lies very close to another monument to red partisans and Red Army soldiers, as well as the site of a holocaust massacre.

Underground is dedicated not only to men like Vitkus, but to all the others who died in the forests as well.