Mes Nešėme Laisvę
Institucijų Kūrimas
Building Institutions · 1955–1964
Published in 1961 during the Building Institutions period.
Mes Nešėme Laisvę ('We Carried Freedom') is a first-person memoir by Petras Pleskevičius documenting his lived experience as a volunteer soldier in the nascent Lithuanian army during the Wars of Independence (1918–1920), including the German occupation, the Bolshevik advance, and the formation of the First Infantry Volunteer Regiment. Published in 1961 by the Canadian-Lithuanian press Rūta in Hamilton, Ontario, it represents one of the few diaspora-era eyewitness military memoirs of Lithuanian independence-era combat. The cover art by Algimantas Trumpickas — depicting a triumphant statue, radiating light, and grasping hands — visually encodes the book's theme of freedom carried through sacrifice.
What It Is
Mes Nešėme Laisvę exemplifies the diaspora memoir as a form of institutional memory-making: published not by a church body or civic organization but by a small Lithuanian-Canadian press operating out of a Hamilton street address, it reveals how the Lithuanian diaspora in Canada sustained a parallel publishing infrastructure that functioned outside both Soviet censorship and mainstream Canadian literary culture. The Rūta press represents a node in the pan-diaspora network of small Lithuanian presses (alongside those in Chicago, New York, and Germany) that collectively ensured the survival of Lithuanian literary and historical production across the mid-twentieth century. The content of this memoir performs a specific cultural survival function: by narrating the founding moments of the Lithuanian military — the volunteer recruitment, the German occupation, the Bolshevik battles for Alytus — Pleskevičius inscribes the legitimacy of Lithuanian statehood into diaspora consciousness at precisely the moment (1961) when Soviet occupation was most entrenched. The act of publishing such a memoir in Hamilton, Ontario, is itself a political statement: Lithuanian independence was real, it was fought for, and its veterans still live and remember. This counter-narrative function distinguishes diaspora memoir from mere nostalgia. The cover art by Algimantas Trumpickas — with its triumphant Vytis-adjacent figure, radiating sun, and outstretched hands — situates the book within a visual tradition of Lithuanian nationalist iconography adapted for diaspora consumption. The deliberate commissioning of original cover art signals that Rūta was publishing with cultural intentionality, not merely reproducing texts. This investment in aesthetics within a small-press context speaks to the seriousness with which the Hamilton Lithuanian community approached its role as custodian of national memory.
Why It Matters
Mes Nešėme Laisvę occupies a precise and underserved position in Lithuanian historical memory: it is the ground-level testimony of a Dzūkija peasant-turned-soldier who fought in the founding military actions of the Lithuanian state, written from the safety of Canadian exile forty years later with the distance and clarity of retrospection. The Wars of Independence (1918-1920) are foundational to Lithuanian national identity, yet the surviving memoir literature is dominated by officer-class accounts and Kaunas-centered perspectives. Pleskevičius, born in Meškučiai village and recruited into the First Infantry Volunteer Regiment at the age of fourteen or fifteen, represents the enlisted men's experience — the hunger, the desertion dynamics, the improvised weapons knowledge, the parish priest as recruiter — that institutional histories flatten into statistics.
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada — origin of 3 works in the archive.
