Kritusieji už Laisvę, II tomas

Kritusieji už Laisvę, Volume II is a landmark document of Lithuanian diaspora historical memory. Published in 1969 — a quarter-century after the Soviet re-occupation of Lithuania — it represents the exile community's sustained, organized effort to name, honor, and historicize the armed resistance fighters whose deaths were systematically erased or distorted in Soviet Lithuanian official historiography. By structuring the volume around regional partisan districts (Aukštaitija, Žemaitija, Dzūkija, Suvalkija) and profiling individual commanders such as Kazys Veverskis, General Motiejus Pečiulionis, and Lieutenant Adolfas Eidimtas alongside ordinary fighters, Ramojus created a counter-archive — a diaspora-produced prosopography of resistance that preserved names and deeds unavailable in Soviet publications.

The volume's embeddedness in diaspora institutional networks — the American Foundation for Lithuanian Research, the Franciscan press, the newspaper Draugas — illustrates how Lithuanian exile organizations in Brooklyn, Chicago, and Detroit functioned as a transnational preservation infrastructure. The cover's Mater Dolorosa imagery consciously fuses Catholic national-martyr symbolism with the political memory of the partisan dead, a visual language legible to the Catholic Lithuanian community worldwide. For heritage communities and scholars alike, this work is an irreplaceable primary source on both the Lithuanian resistance itself and the diaspora's self-understanding in the Cold War decades.

Diaspora documentary publishing: the American Foundation for Lithuanian Research funded and distributed this volume through the Lithuanian exile press network (Franciscan press, Brooklyn) to preserve partisan memory outside Soviet-controlled Lithuania, counter Soviet historiographical suppression, and transmit resistance history to diaspora-born generations.