Nepriklausomai Lietuvai

This volume is a primary document of the Lithuanian diaspora's organized resistance to Soviet occupation and its sustained effort to transmit the values and institutional memory of independent Lithuania to exile and American-born generations. The Lietuvos Šaulių Sąjunga, founded in 1919 during the Wars of Independence, was one of the most significant mass civic-military organizations of interwar Lithuania, uniting hundreds of thousands of men and women across the country. Its reestablishment in exile—documented here at its tenth anniversary—represents a remarkable act of institutional continuity under conditions of statelessness and dispossession.

The volume's memoir sections preserve granular firsthand accounts of šauliai activity across Lithuanian regions (Kretinga, Zarasai, Vilnius, and others), recording names of participants, local commanders, acts of resistance, and the fates of individuals deported or killed under Soviet and Nazi occupation. The Chicago women's šauliai section documents diaspora community life with specificity unavailable elsewhere. Together, these materials constitute an irreplaceable oral-history and documentary layer complementing official Lithuanian archives that were inaccessible to Western researchers during the Soviet period.

Organizational commemoration in diaspora. The Šaulių Sąjunga Tremtyje reestablished in exile and published this volume explicitly to preserve the memory of independent Lithuania's civil-military tradition, recruit younger-generation diaspora members, and assert the continuing legitimacy of Lithuanian independence claims against Soviet occupation.