Kelionė į niekur ir atgal
Atsinaujinimas
Reconnection · 1991–2003
Published in 1993 during the Reconnection period.
A firsthand memoir by Antanina Baltrušienė documenting her deportation from Kaunas on June 13–14, 1941, Siberian exile, imprisonment, and eventual return — one of the earliest post-independence Lithuanian testimonies printed in Kaunas in 1993. The text captures granular detail of Soviet repression: labor camps, prison cells, forced encounters with fellow deportees of Polish and Russian origin, and the psychological survival strategies of Lithuanian women under Stalinist terror. Published just two years after Lithuanian independence was restored, this volume represents the first wave of suppressed memory breaking into print.
What It Is
The text's internal archival section ('Iš autorės archyvo') and the image of a worn prayer book with rosary on page 91 reveal a survival theology in which Catholic devotional objects served as material anchors of Lithuanian identity under Soviet terror — a pattern consistent across the broader deportee memoir corpus. Baltrušienė's references to writers Sofija Kymantaitė-Čiurlionienė and V. Mykolaičius-Putinas as spiritual mentors who urged her to write embed this memoir within the Lithuanian literary tradition, positioning deportee testimony as continuous with national literary culture rather than rupture from it. For the diaspora communities that preserved Lithuanian culture in schools like Žiburio in Detroit, this text represents the kind of Lithuania-published post-independence material that began flowing into diaspora libraries after 1991 — a physical and symbolic bridge between homeland memory and diaspora transmission. Its presence in the Žiburio collection indicates active acquisition networks connecting Kaunas publishers with American Lithuanian heritage institutions, a logistical and cultural infrastructure that itself warrants scholarly documentation.
Kaunas, Lithuania — origin of 11 works in the archive.