“I went into labor the night of Jan. 13, 1991 during the attack on the Television Tower. I was six and a half months pregnant. We lived at the time in Karoliniškės, not far from the television tower. I could hear the shootings, the tanks rumbling, the screams of people in the streets inside my apartment although all our windows were shut. Our 10-month-old son was crawling around my legs, clinging to me, frightened by the sounds coming into our apartment from outside in the streets. I could not get him to go to sleep that night.

“My husband was out there. He was one of the organizers of the defense of the parliament during those weeks. In 1988 my husband joined the Šiaulių Sąjunga. In 1988 this prewar organization was reorganized and many of their meetings took place in our one-room apartment in Karoliniškės. Starting from Jan.8, 1991 my husband was on guard duty round the clock. His assignment was to guard the parliament or other strategic points. So, on the night of Jan. 13, just like on any other night, he was out on guard duty and I was home with our ten-month old son. Because I was six and a half months pregnant, I could only watch the events on television and could not participate myself. As I was watching the reporter Eglė Bučelytė giving an update on the situation, I heard the sound of tanks rumbling past, under our apartment windows. I looked out the window and saw the column of tanks. My first thought was about my husband: he was the type who would put himself in the line of fire to protect others. And he was there—at the television tower. I was sure of it.

“I continued watching the news reports. Eglė Bučelytė stayed on screen until the very last possible moment. She was saying: ‘I can hear them storming inside the building; now they are ransacking the floor below us; I can hear shooting.’ Then came those famous words: ‘These are my last words. They are breaking down my door.’

“Before the screen went blank, I heard the shooting in the background. I know my husband. He is hot-tempered and he is a patriot. I thought to myself, ‘Now I am going to be a widow with two children to raise on my own.’ I began worrying more and more. I’m not the type of woman to cry or scream or complain. Perhaps if I was, things would have turned out differently. Perhaps I would have let my emotions out. Instead, I just sat there by myself in front of the blank television screen and quietly worried. That’s when the contractions started and my water broke.

“I knew it was too soon. Far too soon. Outside my window I could see the tanks and I could hear the shooting and the crowds screaming. The moment my water broke coincided with the very height of the attack on the people who had stood, holding hands, surrounding the television tower.

“I called for an ambulance. The operator said: ‘We have no ambulances. All the ambulances are filled taking the wounded from the television tower to the hospitals. Please, get some one from your family to drive you.’

“So I called my parents. They had a car. But they lived next door to the Radio and Television offices on Konarskis Street and they were under siege at that moment too. They could not get the car out of their parking lot and onto the street.

“I started calling everyone I knew who had a car. No luck. Either their cars weren’t running or people had used them to flee for the provinces or people weren’t picking up their phones because they were out in the demonstrations.

“I gave up trying to get someone on the phone and went and knocked on my neighbor, Silvia’s, door. Silvia was not a nurse or a doctor, but she immediately assessed the situation. ‘Get ready,’ she said, ‘you will give birth here and I will assist you.’

“But I knew that if I gave birth at home the baby would surely die. He was only six and a half months old. But, there was nothing else I could do. I had no choice. The contractions were coming faster and stronger. I could feel that it was time. Yet, I had to hold on. I kept thinking maybe I could still find someone with a car who could get me to the hospital where they would have an incubator.

“Just as I was thinking these thoughts, the doorbell rang. I opened the door and a young man in a white jacket was standing there.

‘Did you call for an ambulance?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ I answered.

‘Let’s go, right now,’ he said.

‘I need a minute to pack my things and get my passport,’ I said. I was standing there in my nightgown, bathrobe, and slippers.

‘We have no time,’ he said, ‘either you come with me now as you are or I am leaving. There are hundreds of wounded out there.’

I grabbed my coat and threw it over my shoulders and handed my baby over to Silvia. I left for the hospital just like that. Years later I was reading a book of people’s memories from that night. I read a part where one doctor wrote: ‘I remember they brought in a woman who was wearing just her nightgown and slippers and nothing more. She looked as though she’d been burned out of her home.’ I am sure that he must have been referring to me.

“They took me to the March Eighth Hospital near the train station. The doctor there told me that because the baby was still premature, they would stop the contractions. They gave me medications that stopped the contractions and I lasted for three days, but on the third day I developed an infection, so then they had to give me medication to induce labor. I went into labor, but one of the doctors felt sorry for me and gave me an epidural to take the edge off the pain and my labor stopped. Then, they removed the baby with forceps. They didn’t tell me at the time, but I found out later through the medical reports that when they used the forceps they squeezed his skull and caused internal bleeding that was quite serious. There was the danger that the baby would not live or if he lived, he would be brain damaged.

“Immediately they put my baby in the incubator. The nurse would bring me over several times a day to see him. He was so tiny and his skin was as red as blood and as wrinkled as an old man’s. There were tubes poking out of every possible orifice. I would pump my milk and they would inject it into him with a syringe.

“That same night that I was brought into the hospital there was a woman in the bed next to mine who also went into premature labor because of the shootings. She was carrying twins. One of her twins died immediately and the other one died a week later. Two boys. Can you imagine that couple’s pain? In my opinion, those baby twins should be buried in the Antakalnis Cemetery along with the thirteen people who were killed that night. They ought to be counted among the casualties.

“My husband came home during the early morning hours on Jan. 13. When he didn’t find me or the baby, he called my parents. My mother explained to him what had happened. She had managed to get the car out later that night and had come and had brought our son back home with her.

“My husband came to see me in the hospital dressed in his uniform. At that time soldiers didn’t yet have Lithuanian uniforms, so he made quite an impression on the hospital staff. It turned out that he had not been at the television tower. Instead, he had been assigned guard duty inside of the parliament. He had not been involved in any of the serious fighting at the television tower.

“I met my husband on Aug. 23, 1988 at the mass Sąjūdis meeting that was held in Vingis Park to mark the forty-fourth anniversary of the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. We were introduced by mutual friends. Our courtship and marriage and the birth of our son all occurred during the period of Lithuania’s national rebirth and the both of us were always involved in everything that was going on.

“At the time people were united under one cause. People were so kind, so helpful, so gentle with one another. The staff at the hospital did everything they possibly could, so that our baby would live. But, there were serious shortages of medicine. The incubator was old and barely worked. They did not have disposable needles. They would wash and reuse the same needles over and over again and for that reason infections spread easily.

“Because my mother was taking care of the baby and I was in the hospital, my husband practically moved in at the parliament. He remained on guard duty there 24 hours a day. He slept there and he ate there. Every few hours he called the hospital to ask my doctor how we were doing. The baby was only a few days old when during one of those phone calls the doctor said to him: ‘The situation is bad. Will you bury the baby or leave him for us?’

“At the time it was common practice if a baby died premature or as a newborn that the death would not be registered and the baby’s remains would be used for scientific research or preserved for medical students.

“My husband is deeply religious. Immediately, he said, ‘I’d like to Christen the baby.’

‘Hurry, because you don’t have much time,’ the doctor said.

“My husband knew Monsignor Vasiliauskas, who had been in hard labor in Siberia together with his brother. He rushed over to the Vilnius Cathedral and found Monsignor Vasiliauskas and asked him to hurry to the hospital to Christian the baby and perform last rights.

“Monsignor hurried ahead of my husband to the hospital and by the time my husband arrived and led me out of my room and to the room in which the christening was taking place, the ceremony was already in progress. I walked in the door and the head doctor who had done so much for our son, and who incidentally was Jewish, was holding the candle and was standing beside Monsignor Vasiliauskas deeply involved in the ceremony. Monsignor Vasiliauskas, in the heat of the moment, had assigned the doctor the role of godfather. All I saw that moment was that a thick cloud of smoke from the candle had wafted over to the baby and he appeared to be having difficulty breathing.

‘What is the baby’s name?’ Monsignor Vasiliauskas asked.

“Name? We hadn’t even thought about a name yet. So much had been going on in our lives between the birth and what was happening in Lithuania with the Soviet troops taking over the radio and television and threatening to storm the parliament.

“My husband answered spontaneously, ‘My father’s name, Vladas.’

“What difference does it make, I thought to myself, the baby was dying anyway.

“The ceremony ended and my husband rushed back to his duties at the parliament. I returned to my hospital bed.

“The next day the baby was still alive.

“When my husband called for an update, the doctor asked if he had permission to transfer Vladas to Santariškės Hospital, a modern, well-equipped hospital with better conditions for premature babies.

“My husband knew the director of the hospital, so he called and made arrangements for an ambulance with good equipment to come and take Vladas and bring him to the other hospital. I was also transferred to the new hospital.

“So then I went to live in the Santariškės Hospital. Even though this hospital was modern and had the best equipment at the time, the conditions were still unsanitary. There was only one bathroom for all the women in the maternity ward and it was not maintained or cleaned regularly. All of us women were still bleeding after having given birth. I remember I’d go into the bathroom and I’d be slipping on blood on the floor. I was lucky though. My husband’s brother would come every day with his car and drive me back to my apartment, so that I could take a shower. Then he’d bring me back to the hospital.

“Whenever my husband asked how Vladas was doing, the doctor at Santariškės would say, ‘We are doing everything we can, but everything is in God’s hands.’

“Then, after a few weeks, when my husband asked, the doctor said, ‘Wait here,’ and left him standing in the corridor.

“After a long while the doctor returned and said, ‘I’ve been to see my supervisor. Vladas is the strongest baby in our section. We are going to transfer him to the newborn nursery.’

“Vladas grew very quickly then. I traveled back and forth between home and the hospital bringing him my milk. When I held my baby in my arms, the nurses would encourage me to talk to him. Then I learned about the internal bleeding in his brain. Again, we had been very lucky. The problem had solved itself.

“What made me sad though, was that while I was living in the hospital I received a letter from my mother. She told me that our older son, Vytenis, had taken his very first steps. He had taken his first steps and I had missed it.

“Once Vladas was big enough, they allowed us to take him home. Since our two sons were ten months apart, I raised them like twins. Only, times were hard. It was still the blockade. Vladas was allergic to penicillin and dairy and everything else. Through humanitarian aid I’d get him soy milk. Still, in general it was very hard to get food. We used cloth diapers at the time and there were no washing machines, so I had to wash them by boiling them in pots on the stove. The heat had been shut off all over Lithuania, so there was the problem of keeping the babies warm.

“My husband was never home. He was busy with the Šiauliai organizing defense all over Lithuania. He visited every single village in Lithuania. He would go to a village and find a volunteer who was willing to harbor weapons and organize resistance if the Russians were to attack. Every volunteer had to take an oath of loyalty and sign their name to it. Because of my husband’s activities, we were constantly monitored by the KGB. They would show up at our apartment at unexpected times. My husband slept very little during those years, maybe two hours at the most.

“And then the putsch happened in Moscow. For a day I was terrified out of my mind. We didn’t know how things would go. But in the end, everything was alright.

“When Vladas was turning 16 and I was organizing his birthday party, he asked me to tell him the story about his birth. I told him and we both got the idea that we ought to invite the doctor who had stood in as his godfather to his birthday party. I found the doctor’s phone number and I called him. He came to the party with his wife and daughter, who as it turned out was in the same school as my older son. The doctor had tears in his eyes when he told me how much Vladas’ life meant to him. He said that at the time it was nearly impossible to keep a premature infant alive because they lacked the proper equipment. Now, they save babies born even smaller than Vladas. But then, then it really meant something to save a baby’s life. Since that birthday party we’ve remained close family friends.”

Laima Vincė, a New York native, is a Lithuanian-American non-fiction and children’s book author, Fulbright scholar in creative writing at Vilnius University, journalist, memoirist and translator. For more information about her work, visit her website at www.laimavince.com and to order her acclaimed memoir “Lenin’s Head on a Platter” go here. Two translations she did of Lithuanian authors can be found here and here.

Disclaimer:

Views expressed in the opinion section are never those of the Baltic Reports company or the website’s editorial team as a whole, but merely those of the individual writer.