Lithuania's Antigone

Dalia Grinkevičiūtė (circa 1950s)

Introduction

The following article was written in 1995 by one of Lithuania’s foremost writers and playwrights, Kazys Saja. In it, he recalls his meeting with Dalia Grinkevičiūtė and his role in arranging for the publication of Grinkevičiūtė's memoir, Lithuanians Near the Laptev Sea.

When this memoir appeared in 1988 in the Soviet era journal Pergalė (Victory), it immediately created a sensation. Political events in Lithuania were beginning to allow more open discussions of certain historical blank spots, one of these being the Soviet deportations of Lithuanians. Grinkevičiūtė did not live to see an independent Lithuania, but her memoir remains as one of the best examples of the talent and spirit of young Lithuania crushed by persecution during the Soviet occupation.

Dalia was fourteen in 1941, when she was exiled with her mother and her brother to the Arctic Circle. Her father, like many other prominent leaders of Lithuanian society, had already been taken and killed to pave the way for the new Communist society being planned for Lithuania.

In the way it deals with exile and moral choice, the story of Dalia’s life has many parallels with the ancient Greek story of Antigone. The King of Thebes had forbidden the burial of Antigone’s brother who had fallen in battle against the King. Rather than leaving her brother where he was slain, Antigone performed the ritual burial of her dead brother, and in this defiant act against the tyrant, she was destroyed.

Dalia and her mother escaped from exile in Siberia and returned illegally to Lithuania in 1950. Life as a fugitive and non-person in Soviet Lithuania became even more of a challenge after Dalia’s mother died and needed a burial place.

With the appearance of this memoir in 1988, many other deportation stories began to appear in print. Dalia Grinkevičiūtė's memoir was reprinted in the collection, Amžino Įšalo Žemėje (In the Land of Permanent Frost) and was translated into English for the journal Lituanus in 1990. A new translation of her work is being planned.

Kazys Saja’s article also points to another issue in Lithuania today, the continued absence of a public accounting and reconciliation about the wrongs committed during the Soviet period by one part of Lithuanian society against another. Collaborators helped implement the sovietization of Lithuania, by sending thousands to exile and certain death. Then, after Stalin’s death, when survivors began to return from exile, they were harassed and discriminated against. These ghosts haunt Lithuania as they do other post-Communist societies.

The following article originally appeared in Lithuanian, in Lietuvos Aidas (1995.10.07).

Lithuania's Antigone

Some people are like an open fire – a flaming bonfire in the dark drawing in all those who have lost their homes and dear ones – while the rest of us are more like thick-walled clay ovens needing endless supplies of wood for anyone close by to feel the warmth.

Dalia Grinkevičiūtė, whom I want to talk about in these pages, was like a brilliant fir tree grown in sandy Lithuanian soil: on fire while she grew, warming many and healing others with her berries, until after exile and the camps when “our own” practitioners tried to chop out Dalia’s roots or to stamp out her last flames.

A small group of Lithuanians and a Burajta native work in the woods cutting trees. Photo from Grinkevičiūtės book*.

Many exiles returning to their homeland from Siberia had doors slammed in their faces. Even today there are many living in their homeland who feel ill at ease, so Dalia Grinkevičiūtė did not fare any better near the amber Baltic Sea than she did by the Laptev Sea. Sometimes executioners know how to torture their own more painfully.

She loved the theater. While assigned to practice medicine in Laukuva, she managed to see the most interesting Lithuanian theater productions. She liked some of my plays (Septynios Ožkėnos – Seven Goatskins, Nerimas – Unease), and I received a number of beautiful encouraging letters from this unknown-to-me doctor.

In 1964 or 1965, while in Vilnius for a physicians’ symposium, Dalia paid me a visit. She revealed stories about her family’s exile, her dead father, and her mother’s longing to die in Lithuania. In 1950, while Stalin’s executioners still guarded the empire, she and her mother managed to escape from the farthest north to reach Kaunas. These fugitives remained in hiding until Dalia’s mother, Pranė Grinkevičienė, died. The daughter then took apart a chest to nail together a makeshift casket, and she dug out a hole in the basement to bury her mother.

Soon after that she was caught in the claws of the security forces, but they never succeeded in learning the location of her mother’s grave. After serving three years in prison for escaping, Dalia was returned to exile. In Omsk, she completed two classes in the Faculty of Medicine, and finished the remaining course work in Kaunas, once again close to her mother’s resting place.

At this point in her story, I made the comparison of Dalia to Antigone. She replied that at the hotel, she had just met a doctor from Moscow who had also dared to confront the tyrants. After Stalin’s death, when certain professors and physicians of Jewish ancestry were being blamed for his death, Dalia’s hotel roommate was in her final class in medical school. As an honors student and a Komsomol member, she was expected to stand up in front of the meeting as a representative of the student body and demand the death sentence for those accused professors. It turned out that Yelena was one of the last to speak. And when she took the stand, she said, “I don’t believe these people are guilty.” That same evening she packed her suitcase and left for the North, not waiting for the certain sentence of exile there.

This Yelena was the now world-renowned Yelena Bonner, the soon to be wife and associate of Andrei D. Sacharov. Doctor Dalia maintained a correspondence with them and for this reason her life in the Šilale region came under attack. Comrade Širvydas, the First Secretary of the Communist Party for the Šilale region who had pledged to “purify” his region, conveyed a letter to Dalia Grinkevičiūtė, “The regional Communist Party is of the opinion that you need to change your place of residence.” Dr. Dalia responded (her words are recorded in her writings saved by the friend who sheltered her, A. Sulskytė): “I walk on Lithuania's ground, on my ancestors’ land, not on the Party’s land. The land that soaked up my ancestors’ blood gives me the right to live here.”

In 1974, B. Vitkevičiius, the head of security for the Šilale region, attempted to take away from this doctor, who graduated with honors from the Kaunas Medical Institute, the right to practice medicine. “Perhaps you’ll go out of your mind or you will kill yourself. Maybe hopelessness will make you take an illegal step and then – off to jail.”

A map of the small town of Barajta, which was the closest to civilization that Grinkevičiūtė and other deportees found. Illustration from Grinkevičiūtės book*.

Such a step indeed happened to Dalia, one not easily intimidated; her writings about Lithuanians suffering in exile had reached the West. Security Agent Vitkevičius got promoted and Alšauskas, who still resides in Šilale, filled his place. Was he the one who took the initiative in 1982 to bring action against Dalia Grinkevičiūtė for “freeloading”?

“Alšauskas has gone beyond the limit of bearable taunts and meaningless torments,” wrote the destitute but still undaunted Dalia. “I would like to know whether he’s doing this of his own initiative or is this an order from Vilnius.” After enduring new interrogations that same year, she wrote, “For 40 years I’ve waited for the punishment of the executioners of Trofimovsky (near the Arctic Circle). Every self-respecting government tries to clean itself of scum, but our executioners have not suffered. Why are they not judged? They receive personal pensions, they are awarded veterans’ medals.”

Today, these words should be addressed to comrades of Vitkevičius and Alšauskas, who would prefer to be called "excellencies", but who essentially were their partners in crime. And I address these words (in 1995) to President Brazauskas, who wants the people of independent Lithuania to accept as normal that bloodstained word, "collaborator".

In August of 1987, already severely ill, Dalia Grinkevičiūtė traveled to Vilnius to pass on to me her most precious possession, her manuscript of 47 densely written pages. She had not wanted to use the telephone, so several times she climbed four flights up to our apartment; but we were never there. She then took her manuscript to J. Marcinkevičius. I don’t know whether Dalia herself had not resolved to ask this poet to keep her writings safe or whether Marcinkevičius, contenting himself to read only one or other passage from the memoir, returned it. In the end, my wife and I turned up.

Grinkevičiūtė looked very tired. The elbows of her sweater had been carefully mended and she only agreed to partake of some milk and a roll. She warned us not to keep the manuscript at home. We took it soon to our place in the countryside where my wife typed it up. We titled her manuscript, Lithuanians by the Laptev Sea.

We learned that fall that Dalia was hospitalized in the Kaunas Oncology Center. On a visit, we took several copies of her manuscript and told her that other copies were already circulating among our friends. This was the last happiness we could give this woman – Lithuania’s Antigone – dying of cancer. She already had a stomach ulcer when she returned from exile, but as the director of Laukuva’s hospital she had an annual obligation to supply blood from one hundred donors. How can you persuade others, if you will not set an example?

“It is much easier to breathe with the thought that as much as my strength, my mind and my talents allowed, I could erect at least this memorial for the victims in the North. The world has discovered those thousands of nameless victims lying like brothers in an icy grave. You can’t destroy this fact nor erase it. This is history. This is also a monument to my parents.” 

* Illustration and photos from: Amžino Įšalo Žemėje by Dalia Grinkevičiūtė (edited by Aldona Žemaitytė) published by Vyturio Leidykla in 1989.