Amanda called me early one Sunday morning. “Antanas called me,” she said, “he invited me over at twelve to pick up some books. And to say good-bye before I leave for America. Why don’t you come along?”

“I’ll be right over,” I said and headed out the door to Amanda’s apartment in Antakalnis. I knew Amanda didn’t mean any old Antanas, but Antanas Terleckas, the founder and former leader of the Lithuanian Freedom League (Lietuvos Laisvės Lyga).

I’d been wanting to meet Antanas Terleckas and interview him for a very long time. Terleckas had been a voice of dissent during the push for independence. He had unflinchingly insisted that the officially recognized movement for reform within the Soviet Union, Sąjūdis, not buckle in to pressure from the Soviet authorities and not compromise by accepting greater sovereignty within the structure of the Soviet Union. He insisted Lithuania push for total and absolute independence.

In the late 1980s and early 90s the Lithuanian Freedom League was repressed by Soviet authorities and often pushed to the sidelines by Sąjūdis, who was not willing to share the limelight with a pack of outspoken former political prisoners, tough men and women who’d done their time in hard labor in Siberia and as a result feared nothing the Soviet system could throw at them. They’d already been to hell and back and had survived. Meanwhile, the members of Sąjūdis, many of them Communist Party members, had careers and reputations and families to protect.

Terleckas had been a prisoner of conscience and had served time in hard labor in Siberia for his political ideas, and for his underground publications on human rights abuses in the Soviet Union. Although Terleckas had a degree in economics and a career as a credit inspector for the Soviet State Bank in the mid-1950s, he became an anti-Soviet political activist, risking, and then losing, everything: his family, his freedom, his career, and his homeland.

Born in 1928, Terleckas was at the tail end of the generation that had joined the partisan resistance. He survived the post-war era, and then founded the underground Lithuanian Freedom League in 1978.

In the twenty years since independence Terleckas has been hard at work writing and self-publishing books and manifestos on Lithuanian politics and history. Terleckas’ books, though not available in any book store or over the Internet, are well-written, carefully researched historical documents. Amanda had come home from her last visit with Terleckas with an enviable teetering pile of his self-published books and manifestos.

Amanda met Terleckas last February completely by chance. She had been to a conference held on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of Sąjūdis and to commemorate the 70^th birthday of Professor Bronius Genzelis, a member of Sąjūdis’s inner council. A charter bus transported conference participants from Kaunas to Vilnius, but dropped them off in an area that was unfamiliar to Amanda, who’d just arrived from the United States to spend a year in Vilnius reading interrogation files in the KGB archives. Amanda was writing her dissertation on the protests that followed the self-immolation of Romas Kalanta in 1972. As she stood in the dark and cold, a kindly older gentleman offered to show Amanda the way to the trolleybus stop. That gentleman turned out to be Antanas Terleckas. It turned out they both lived in the same neighborhood, so they rode the trolleybus together, deep in conversation the entire ride. Amanda did not hesitate when Terleckas invited her up to his apartment to meet his wife.

His wife greeted Amanda warmly, setting out tea and biscuits. Amanda stayed an entire three hours as the couple regaled her with amusing stories from hard labor camp, laughing over anecdote after anecdote, recalling various Soviet jailers and interrogators and apparatchiks, giggling over their own jokes. Amanda told me she could not get over the good humor and generosity of spirit of these former prisoners of conscience.

“Their survival humor impressed me,” she’d said. “How could people who had suffered so much and who had lost so much, still have that much joy for life and be so open-minded? It was incredible.”

Amanda laughed out loud when she told me about the moment that evening that had amused her the most. While telling Amanda about his encounters with Lithuanian-Americans on his trip to Chicago, Terleckas looked at her earnestly and with complete sincerity had said: “Those Chicago Lithuanians, now those people are fanatics!”

“And that is coming from a man who has been called a fanatic himself!” Amanda exclaimed.

I could see why Amanda was hooked on Eastern Europe. She got the humor. If you don’t get the humor, you might as well pack up and go home because in this bleak history there is very little else to hold onto.

Amanda and I decided to drive the few blocks to Terleckas’s apartment complex.

As my Honda struggled up the steep drive to the top where Terleckas’s apartment building stood on a rickety incline, a tall typical red brick Soviet-era concrete cinder block structure, Amanda told me about how last February, in the snow and bitter cold, Terleckas, who’d just been released from the hospital the previous day, insisted on accompanying her to the bus stop. He climbed down six flights of concrete steps, carrying the heavy bag laden with the books he’d given her, and then walked all the way down the snowy, slippery hill in the dark and bitter cold to the bus stop, where he stood a long while and waited with her until her trolleybus arrived. Before leaving the apartment, Amanda had looked imploringly to Terleckas’s wife, begging her to not let him do this. The man was, after all, eighty-one, but his wife said, “He couldn’t be any other way. My husband is a gentleman.”

We parked the Honda and entered the apartment building. We climbed those same dismal concrete steps almost to the very top. I felt as though we were ascending the staircase of Mordor to visit the wizard in the tower. I did not know what to expect. Would there be the typical spread of food waiting for us? Were we guests of honor? How would I be perceived, as an interloper or a friend? Though Amanda’s Lithuanian was good, she confessed that she did not quite understand the seriousness of Terleckas’s wife’s condition when he’d explained it to her over the phone.

“Why do they put senior citizens into housing like this?” Amanda asked, trudging up the poorly lit dinghy concrete staircase.

“Nobody really looks after the elderly on the government level. They are considered the responsibility of the family. They must have been assigned this flat when they were younger,” I said.

“I can barely get up these stairs,” Amanda said, “I wonder how they do it every day?”

We reached the door and rang the bell. Terleckas was already waiting for us in the hallway. I was surprised at how attractive he was, despite his age. He had nicely shaped large blue eyes and a lively intelligent expression. Terleckas is tall, almost two meters tall. His build was strong, large-boned, stocky. I rarely met young men in Lithuania built like Terleckas.

“Come in, come in,” Terleckas said eagerly, opening the door wide and smiling courteously, obviously pleased to have visitors. “My wife is in the hospital, and I don’t know how to brew coffee, but I have some juice and chocolates on the table. Make yourselves at home. Take some refreshment, please.”

Amanda and I stepped inside the narrow hallway. To our immediate left was a small room that looked like a bedroom. In front of us there were two rooms. The room to the right was the kitchen. The one to the left appeared to be a sitting room, though there was a mattress on the floor. We hesitated a moment, not sure direction to turn.

Seeing our hesitation, Terleckas said, “Go directly to the room on the left and sit down.”

We stepped deeper inside the narrow corridor. Along the walls, stacked to the ceilings, were brown paper packages of books. These were Terleckas’s self-published works that he handed out to whoever was interested in acquainting themselves with twentieth century Lithuanian politics and history. There were four volumes of his memoirs as a dissident and political prisoner and then political activist; then a volume of his diaries written while in the hard labor camp in Siberia and a volume of his diaries from the Communist era; and then there was a book of his letters to his wife, written from the hard labor camp in Siberia in the sixties and seventies. She had remained alone in Lithuania. When he had been arrested, she was pregnant with their son. Their daughter was just four. During the time Terleckas was incarcerated, his wife spent seven months in the hospital with a burst appendix.

Amanda and I entered the sitting room. There was a narrow Soviet-style sofa pushed up against the wall, the type that was used as a bed at night and a sofa by day. A mattress lay on the floor. Against the opposite wall there was a simple wooden table and several chairs. A collection of potted plants were arranged on the windowsill. One entire wall of the room was taken up by a massive Soviet-era pressed particle board bookshelf crammed with political books, journals, magazines, and the memoirs of survivors of Siberia.

“While my wife was sick,” Terleckas said glancing over at the sofa, “she slept on that couch and I slept on the mattress on the floor beside her, so that I could get up at night and help her. Now she’s been in the hospital five months. She’s developed epilepsy on top of her cardiac troubles. They keep watch over her around the clock. My children bring me to the hospital to visit her. I myself am in and out of the hospital every few months for my condition. Our poor children are constantly running between doctors and hospital rooms.”

I made polite inquiries about his wife’s health and his own, but Terleckas, though acknowledging my questions, directed us to sit down and did not continue the conversation. Unlike many old people I knew, he did not seem eager to belabor us with the details of his wife’s illness or his own. He was interested in hearing about us, about our work. I noticed a framed poster on the wall. The only ornament in the room. My brother Vincas had the same framed poster on his wall too. For about ten years now Vincas hauled that poster around with him every time he moved into a new apartment. It was one of the first things he did setting up house was hang the poster in a place of honor on his wall. The poster was of a little girl seated on an unseen figure’s shoulder, waving a Lithuanian national flag with an exuberant expression of joy on her face. The girl’s head rose above the backs of soldiers armed with plexi-glass shields and guns. The photo was taken moments before troops attacked innocent demonstrators on September 28, 1988 in Vilnius’ Cathedral Square.

“My brother has that same poster framed on his wall at home,” I said as a conversation starter, “I remember that day so well.”

Violence met with peace

I told Terleckas the story about how I had been at that September 28, 1988 Lithuanian Freedom League demonstration with a few students from Punskas. After Terleckas finished speaking and asked people to go home peacefully, I spotted a friend in the crowd. That friend invited me to go with him to a closed Sąjūdis meeting. I parted with the friends I’d come to the demonstration with and left for the Sąjūdis meeting. Later, sitting in the Sąjūdis meeting, someone came running in and shouted out that people were being attacked with tear gas and clubs in the Cathedral Square. As it turned out, I had walked out of the demonstration just moments before the command to attack had been given.

“I remember that moment when you said to the crowds that we should all disperse peacefully in the spirit of Ghandi and Martin Luther King and go home,” I said.

“Yes, and you should have listened to me,” Terleckas said with a tone of fatherly firmness in his voice, “the militia always broke up our gatherings with violence.”

“We did listen, only we were lingering and chatting with friends, just like everyone else.”

“You should have run the moment I told everyone to disperse peacefully,” Terleckas said. “Oh, but I was a good runner back then. I was already 60, but I could still run. I just lit out. The soldiers couldn’t catch up to me because they were burdened with heavy shields and equipment.”

We sat down at the table. Terleckas had set out two glasses, a package of juice and a bottle of mineral water. He also had chocolates, a local favorite, Paukščių Pienas. I liked that he hadn’t overdone it. He was treating us like equals, not like people he had to impress with a spread of food. Simple refreshment was enough.

Swindled by the wrong cause

“The Communists only let Sąjūdis operate peacefully,” Terleckas continued, “Sąjūdis had their backing. The Communists wanted to create a sovereign Leninist autonomous state of Lithuania within the context of the Soviet Union. That’s why Sąjūdis was officially allowed to exist and function. We, on the other hand, were constantly being chased down because we wanted independence and we stated that openly from the beginning. Just look at it this way, although by 1989 people could speak freely about political repressions, we were still living in an occupied country. A benign occupation is still an occupation. Either you are free or you are not free. There is no two ways about it. And we would not compromise.”

“That’s just what my grandfather said in his 1989 Christmas address to Lithuania over Radio Free Europe,” I said.

“An intelligent man,” Terleckas said with conviction. “All those Lithuanian-Americans who were sending large sums of money to Sąjūdis were in effect only supporting the Communist government, pumping up a crumbling system with money and goods. I have to admit, it was a brilliant move on the part of the KGB.”

I remembered the large sums of money  collected in the émigré community to support Sąjūdis. Much of that money disappeared out of Sąjūdis headquarters along with computers and other donated electronics. Much of it was reported to have ended up in some Sąjūdis members’ private possession.

“The Lithuanian-Americans did not understand who they were dealing with,” Terleckas continued. “They were naïve. After a visit with members of Sąjūdis, Lozoraitis spoke on The Voice of America, saying it was possible to work together with the Communists, to negotiate with them. Sąjūdis would send their representatives over to America, but the people they sent were Communist party members who were still reporting to Soviet authorities. Large sums of money were entrusted to these people, but that money was not used for the appropriate reasons. That money was really only supporting the Soviet system as it was then in 1988-1990. The Lithuanian Freedom League received very little money from the émigrés. But we didn’t need much. We only needed money to support our publications, not for ourselves. When I traveled to the West I did not openly ask for financial support, but Sąjūdis did. They actively collected funds. The other problem was that people from Sąjūdis presented me to the émigré community as the lunatic fringe, as some dangerous extreme element who was out to undermine their work and tip the scales against independence.”

I considered that statement a moment. It was true, in the Lithuanian-American community the Lithuanian Freedom League, although supported by some small groups, was considered an element that could throw off the balance of negotiations with the Communists. Lithuanian-Americans had bought into the Sąjūdis construct that Lithuania could only seek sovereignty within the framework of the Soviet Union by working together with the Communist party. Terleckas and his people operated on the principle: Call something by what it is and do not compromise and enter into needless negotiations. A foreign occupation was just that, a foreign occupation.

I asked Terleckas if he knew of a certain former KGB informer who was rumored to now be mentally unstable. This man revealed information about the inner workings of the KGB publicly.

“Yes, he was a KGB lieutenant who went mad,” Terleckas said, adding, “his poor wife. She only saw it years later when she realized he was working for the KGB. The duplicity of his lifestyle drove him over the deep end. He could have had quite a career as a scientist.”

“That’s right,” I said. “I’ve heard this man speak. He drifts in and out of paranoia, at moments becoming remarkably lucid. In those moments of lucidity he outlined KGB strategy regarding Sąjūdis, the independence movement, and the events of the eighties and early nineties. He said something that struck me, coming from the mouth of a former KGB informer, though I’ve also heard this statement from other people who’d been involved in the movement for independence at the time.”

A modest man

I paused. I looked at Terleckas. He was interested in what I was about to say, but I could also see that his character was strong and whatever I revealed would not rock his world.

“This former KGB lieutenant said that Lithuania would not be independent today if it were not for Antanas Terleckas.” I continued, “He, a former KGB lieutenant, a man who had the assignment of monitoring and influencing the activities of Sąjūdis from the inside, in a moment of lucidity acknowledged that you and that the Lithuanian Freedom League brought down the Soviet Union.”

“That’s nonsense,” Terleckas said, waving his large farmer’s hand dismissively. “Landsbergis was the man who declared independence, I will give him that; however, he was able to be in that historical position because his organization was given permission by the Soviet authorities to operate and they gained the appropriate political power and public support. But I won’t forgive Landsbergis for not passing an anti-Sovietization law that would have barred former Communists from serving in independent Lithuania’s new government. We are feeling the effects of compromise and corruption today because Landsbergis did not draft and pass such a law at the moment when it was imperative to do so.”

I was struck by Terleckas’s modesty. He had been the conscience of the nation, standing behind Sąjūdis, pushing them forward whenever they wavered. If  the Lithuanian Freedom League had not been suppressed, it very well may have been Antanas Terleckas who would have declared independence. He would have earned that historical honor. It was then that I realized, sitting there on a cheap rickety wooden chair beside a battered table disguised under a white cloth table cloth, among all of this man’s worldly possessions — a mountain of self-published books — into which he’d poured his entire life’s savings, that I was sitting before the man who should have been Lithuania’s first president. But history had wronged him and here he was, infirm, barely scraping by on his small state pension. Terleckas was left to live out his ruined life in a two-room Soviet flat on the top floor of a crumbling block Soviet apartment building, on top of a high hill, a prisoner to a steep staircase and an even steeper incline.

But I saw no bitterness in Terleckas’s eyes and heard no regret in his voice. He was still active as a dissident voice, writing and self-publishing his volumes, speaking out where necessary. True, though, his present frustration was that he did not have the funds to self-publish the final volume of his series of memoirs. He did not even consider asking for government funding. He knew this current government would never support his work.

History may have passed him by, but the man kept on going.

“This former KGB lieutenant,” I continued, “admitted that Sąjūdis’s elite, the inner council, was infiltrated by Communists and people reporting to the KGB, but the lower echelons of Sąjūdis, the students and young people, were not.  The Lithuanian Freedom League influenced the thinking of those people and that spirit moved up the ranks and forced the hand of Sąjūdis’ elite, leading to Landsbergis’ February 16, 1989 declaration of the intent to pursue independence.”

“That is pretty much how it was,” Terleckas conceded, adding “the people who joined our organization knew what they were getting in to and knew what the consequences were. We tried to turn the young people away because we did not want to ruin their lives and careers. No youth could officially join the Lithuanian Freedom League unless they’d already been expelled from the University or thrown out of work. The Communists immediately had any students who joined expelled or they were beaten up or harassed.”

“How could you tell who you could trust?” I asked.

“A coward will always betray you,” Terleckas said. “The only way you can know if you can trust someone is by whether they are a coward or not. You should also look out for people with big egos and a lot of pride. They can be easily bought.”

True courage

“I’m not saying that I am so brave,” Terleckas continued, “My courage wasn’t mine. It came from some place outside of me. My courage was like a force outside of me that would come to me just at the moment when I needed it most. I remember when I was in prison in Siberia. I had two years left to go before my release. Two years meant two winters and winter meant 60 below. They called me in to talk. They said to me, ‘If you agree to say only good things about the Soviet Union whenever you talk with anyone, we will let you go now.’ It was a temptation. My children were small. They needed me. My wife had been in the hospital for seven months, very ill with a burst appendix. It would have been so easy to agree and not so terrible. I could agree to their conditions and then never actually act them out. Who would know? But the moment I thought that, a force came to me from outside of me and I knew, I could never agree to those terms. I would have to serve the remainder of my sentence. I had no other choice. I told them no and they shouted at me and called me a fool and an ingrate and threw me back in jail.”

Terleckas paused and peered at me, “You see,” he said with a sincerity in his voice that I’d rarely encountered with anyone I’d only just met, “even if you are the only one in the world who knows about it, a compromise is still a compromise and you will have to live with it and it will eat away at you from the inside.”

Later, over pizza and beer, Amanda said to me, “Everyone I’ve met in Lithuania will always say to me, so and so is KGB. If everyone who is accused of being in the KGB really was, then they were very ineffective agents because Lithuania became independent.  Sometimes I get tired of all the conspiracy theories.”

She was referring to a rumor that Terleckas had been KGB.

Amanda leaned back and sighed, “I guess if I’m talking this way it means I’m ready to go home. In the long run, Lithuania is independent. That is what is important. It is time to stop analyzing all the fine points of how they got that way.”

“Yes, though I can see how there may have been a plan by the Communists to create a sovereign Lithuania that would be another satellite to Russia, like Belarus,” I said.

“I agree,” Amanda said, “but they didn’t get away with it and that is my final word. And, I’m boarding a plane home tomorrow.”

I laughed. I knew I would miss Amanda — her sharpness, her northwest accent, her acquired taste in East European humor and her prim ways. Who else would be willing to go down the rabbit hole with me on my East European adventures once Amanda was gone?

Amanda and I hugged goodbye on the sidewalk in front of the IKI supermarket among the rushing traffic of Antakalnis Street. Then she turned and she was gone.

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.

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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.