“Every time my back hurts, I remember Kaplan, my interrogator,” Leonora said, leaning over the dining room table, setting down three tea cups.

“Why?” I asked, then immediately slapped my hand over my mouth, embarrassed by my own stupid question.

Leonora looked up and said in a matter-of-fact voice, “Because during my interrogation he beat me with a Russian soldier’s belt on my back until the meat was shredded down to the nerves.”

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She did not say this in a way as to illicit pity. Rather, she had said it in a perfectly reasonable tone, as though brutal beatings under interrogation were unavoidable, and the reason why her back throbbed now.

I rose from the table to help Leonora, but she waved me back down into my seat, and hurried off into the kitchen. I glanced over at the rifle she kept cocked and loaded behind the dining room door and decided this was a woman one obeyed.

I had met Leonora Grigalevičiūtė-Rubine last February. That day I had been a participant in a book event at the Vilnius Book Fair. Jonas, a friend, also a journalist who did research on the armed postwar resistance, was at the event. Afterward, he asked me:

“Do you have your car?”

“Yes,” I said, thinking, oh no, now what. Jonas was constantly racing between interviews and appointments and it was easy to get caught up in his under-toe.

“You could drive me home, and on the way home, I’ve got to stop and do an errand,” he said.

Before I could say another word, he asked, “Perhaps your boys would like to meet the liaison woman for Žemaitis?”

“Žemaitis?” I said. “I’d like to meet her.”

Žemaitis was a hero of the armed partisan resistance against the Soviet Union. Jonas Žemaitis had been born in Palanga in 1909. In 1929 Žemaitis graduated from military school in Kaunas. Between 1936 and 1938 he studied in the Ecole d’Artillerie de Fontainebleau artillery school in France where he received the rank of captain. In 1941, after the Germans invaded Lithuania, Žemaitis organized 150 men in the counties of Šiluva and Tytuvėnai into a local unit under the command of General Plechavičius. The Germans dismantled the Plechavičius units and for some time Žemaitis went into hiding. When the Red Army invaded Lithuanian in 1944, Žemaitis became involved in the armed resistance. In 1945 he served as the leader of the Žebenkšties Unit. In May 1947 he was selected as leader of the Kęstutis partisan district. In May 1948 he formed the Jūra partisan district in western Lithuania and became its leader. In February of 1949 Žemaitis was elected chairperson of the presidium of the Lithuanian Freedom League and at the same time was the leader of civil defense. He was awarded the rank of Partisan General. He suffered a heart attack in December of 1951 and temporarily had to leave his post, which he resumed in 1953. During those two years he lay paralyzed in a bunker in the Šimkaitis forest in the Jurbarkas region. On May 30, 1953 his hiding place was betrayed to Soviet security forces and Žemaitis was captured alive. He was brought to Moscow where he was interrogated by Lavrentiy Beria himself. On November 26, 1954, after weeks of interrogation and torture, he was executed by gunshot in the Moscow Butyrk jail. In 2009, on the hundredth anniversary of his birth, Jonas Žemaitis-Vytautas was named as Lithuania’s fourth president. Lithuania’s third president, Antanas Smetona, had fled Lithuania in 1940 after the Lithuanian government made the decision to allow Soviet troops onto Lithuanian soil, initiating the first Soviet occupation.

Driving through Vilnius Jonas treated me like I was a liaison girl leading him to a secret bunker: turn left here, now right, now left again, without telling me exactly where we were going. It was irritating, but I played along. I knew that sometimes researchers couldn’t help but meld their lives with those of their subjects.

We ended up in Žvėrynas. Jonas ordered me to park along the edge of the street. The boys opted to stay inside the car while Jonas and I walked over to one of the wooden houses typical of the Žvėrynas neighborhood.

An attractive tall woman in her 80s with short-cropped white hair opened the door.

“So, you change girlfriends often,” she said to Jonas. “Last time you came to see me with another one.”

“Oh no, that other girl was my assistant,” Jonas rushed to explain, flustered.

“Your personal assistant?” Leonora asked sarcastically, giving him a knowing look.

I liked this woman immediately.

“Hum, I see, and who was that other girl?” I teased, carrying the joke further, taking the opportunity to get back at Jonas and embarrass him.

Jonas grew more flustered. I decided to let him off the hook. I told Leonora that the not-so-exciting truth was that we were just friends who sometimes collaborated on projects.

Leonora led us upstairs to the apartment of Juozas Šimonis, a former partisan and close friend with whom she’d served a five-year sentence at the concentration camp in Magadan, Siberia. Šimonis had been a wealth of information on the resistance until a few years ago, but now old age had set in and his health no longer permitted him to be able to share what he knew. Jonas had come too late. If only he had interviewed Šimonis two years ago, Leonora kept repeating, like she’d told him too.

We sat a few moments and chatted about this and that, then Leonora rose to put on her coat. “If you drive me home, I’ll give you some Latvian fish,” she said.

“Agreed,” I said, remembering the scene in Juozas Lukša’s “Forest Brothers” where he and his brother promise the Russian soldiers vodka and food if they drove them home.

“But just fish, nothing more than that,” Leonora said.

We piled into my Honda. I turned to Dainius and Aurimas and said, “This is Leonora Grigalevičiūtė-Rubine, she was a liaison woman for the great partisan leader General Jonas Žemaitis.”

My boys did not react. I suspected they were growing tired of being introduced to former partisans, liaison women, and victims of Siberian exile.

We drove to Žemaitės Street where Leonora was staying with Laima, the daughter of another close friend who had been in hard labor together with her in Magadan. We walked into the two-room apartment and immediately fell to removing our coats and shoes. The apartment, though small and built during the Brezhnev era of cheap disposable housing, had been nicely renovated and was well-kept. We were introduced to Laima, Eleonora’s confirmation daughter and hostess whenever she came to Vilnius. Laima had not been expecting us. She was in the middle of hanging out her wet laundry. Now Laima rushed around the room, pushing laundry racks against the walls. Quickly, she removed the lap top and papers from her desk and turned it around to face the sofa. She snatched a table cloth from a drawer, gave it a quick snap, and lay it down in a pretty triangle on the table. Then she rushed into the kitchen. Running back and forth a few times, she brought out platters of dried fish sliced neatly into rectangles, black bread, cold chicken with cranberry, and bowls of vegetable soup. We chatted as we ate. I realized I had less than an hour left with this woman who’d played such a key role in Lithuania’s anti-Soviet resistance and we were squandering it on small talk. I had to think of a question that would lead her into a conversation of substance. But I couldn’t think of anything, so, instead, I asked a personal question.

“How did you end up in Latvia? Was it because of marriage?” Atitekėjote was the verb I had used. It is a very specific verb with no exact translation in English. It means marrying into a situation or a new place.

Leonora’s face lit up. “Well, this question is about my personal life,” she said.

Up until this point, between the small talk, Leonora had eluded to episodes from her life as Žemaitis’s liaison woman. She referred to that aspect of her life as “my job” or tarnyba. Although personal calling was a large part of their sacrifice, once inside these structures, the partisans and liaison women worked with the discipline and integrity of professionals. They did not romanticize their work and did not consider themselves heroes. They were soldiers who performed their duty for their country. With my question Leonora had made an important distinction — to talk about her personal life.

“As a prisoner I worked in a factory in Magadan sewing green house covers from thick green burlap. One day a Latvian prisoner came into the factory and asked if I could sew him a pair of work gloves from the green burlap. I did. When he came to pick up the gloves, he thanked me in just the way my first husband, Bronius, who was a partisan and who had been killed, would have thanked me. He reminded me so much of my husband, I fell in love with him. Up until that point I had dreamed of Bronius every night. After I met Izidor Rubine, Bronius stopped coming to me in my dreams. Izidor and I promised to write to each other. You were not allowed to write to other prisoners, especially to men, but it was something we all did. We’d write in tiny letters on scraps of paper and pass these letters to each other. It was fun. It helped pass the time,” Leonora said.

“I did not know Latvian. Not one word. So I asked a Latvian prisoner to help me write the letters. We would sit on the bunks in the barracks after work at night and compose the letters together. We wrote to each other like that for four years. The first three years we wrote about all sorts of nonsense. After I read his letters, I would burn them. After three years of writing back and forth like that, I realized that my feelings for him had become quite deep. Around the same time he also had the same realization and his letters changed too. Then I could no longer bring myself to burn his letters and I saved them. I also could no longer ask the Latvian woman to help me write the letters because I wanted to write about more personal things. So, I made myself a small Lithuanian-Latvian dictionary. But then I didn’t have enough words to express myself. That really worried me. So, I came up with an idea. I would take a Lithuanian word and chop the ending off. It worked. We could have written to each other in Russian, but we didn’t want to. He was a real patriot of Latvia and he refused to write in any other language. He was in prison because he would travel on the trains back and forth between Latvia and Russia getting Latvian prisoners out of Siberia with fake documents.”

“Years later, Izidor would say to me, ‘You wrote so well in Latvian!’

“I served my five-year-sentence, but he still had one more year left. So, I waited in Magadan one year and worked while he finished his sentence. Then we left for Latvia together.”

“A friend of mine once said to me, ‘If you really love someone, you must learn their mother tongue,’” I said.

“Oh, yes,” Leonora clapped her hands together, delighted, “Or you must sleep with them, then you’ll absorb their language.”

We both laughed.

When I spoke to these old partisans and liaison women, to the people who’d lived through the horrors of Siberia, in spite of the torture and humiliation they had lived through, they spoke of love with such tenderness and belief that for the first time in my life I began to understand what love actually was. These people had a quality of feeling, an exclusivity for another person, most of whom had lived through hard times with them, whether it was a woman friend or a man who was just a friend or a precious lover, it did not matter, they were loyal with a loyalty that went beyond the physical, with a closeness that was spiritual, that extended beyond death through communication in dreams. And, they knew how to revel in their love. How not to question their good fortune. How not to over-analyze or get caught up in the pettiness that so often destroyed relationships. We contemporary people of the information age do not know how to love: We are far too practical. We are far too distracted. Too busy. We are annoyed and angered by the smallest slights; we find too little joy in the simple happiness of one another’s existence. People like Leonora were the true romantics. If their lives didn’t kill them first.

Caught up as I was in my thoughts, I’d let the thread of our conversation drop. Leonora let out a deep sigh and gazed contemplatively into the dim February light.

“Oh how we had wanted to live,” Leonora said in a half-whisper.

That day Leonora invited me to drive to Jūrmala, Latvia in the summer to stay with her and to hear her story: the unabridged version.

And now here we were, my friend Virginia and I, after three days of driving along the coastal road that circled Latvia, through outrageously beautiful forests that varied between firs and pines and birches and long desolate beaches where Virginia and I had wandered for hours and had met no one. Virginia had grown up on a collective farm in the same region as Leonora, in Žemaitija. She knew her dialect and her ways and that region’s local history. Her family had also suffered under the Soviets — many of them had been deported to Siberia. After our interviews, Virginia would go over the material I’d collected and explain the meaning of words in dialect or the significance of understated cultural references.

While Leonora was busy in her kitchen, Virginia and I sat at the long dining room table, looking around us. A large black-and-white glossy photograph of a very good-looking man with brown hair slicked back in a 1950s cut and piercing brown eyes and classic features gazed down at me. It had to be Izodor, I thought, Leonora’s Latvian husband, whom she’d written letters to in Magadan.

Virginia leaned over and fell to reading the spines of the books in the bookshelf.

“Oh my,” Virginia exclaimed, “I have all these same titles at home, only in Lithuanian.”

Leonora returned from the kitchen and poured us our tea. She set down a box of chocolates along with the sweets we had brought her. She settled into the chair at the end of the table.

“These are very pretty plates,” I said, admiring the plate Leonora had set in front of me. The plate had a flower pattern and a pretty gold-painted rim.

“My Magadan brother, Juozas Šimonis, gave those to me fifty years ago. He came to visit for a few weeks after he was released from prison and had returned to Lithuania. As a thank you, the day he was leaving, he walked in with a large box, an entire service, thirty pieces. ‘Juozai,’ I gasped. I knew he had spent a month’s salary on that service. I knew what it cost. I told him it was too good a gift. He insisted I had to have it. That was the kind of man he was. Now, there are only a few plates left from that service. My children and grandchildren have broken them, one by one, over the years.”

Leonora poured us each a cup of tea and settled back down into her chair. “Now I’m ready,” she said.

“Tell me about your childhood,” I asked.

“I was born March 25, 1923 in Raseiniai county, 80 km west of Kaunas. I had three sisters: Apolinaria, Bronė, Marytė and a brother named Stasys. My sister Bronė was also a liaison woman for Žemaitis. She was three years older than me.

We lived on a farm, but my father was active culturally and politically, so most of the farm work fell on my mother’s shoulders. My father was a social democrat. He had read Marx and Lenin and he had come to the conclusion that socialism was a good thing. He really believed that people could live better under socialism. In 1920, when Lithuania had only been independent for two years and held its first meeting of the newly-elected parliament, my father walked the eighty kilometers to Kaunas to vote. He arrived too late. The polls were closed. When the Russians occupied Lithuania in 1940 it was a knife in my father’s heart.

“I learned how to read by reading over my father’s shoulder. My sister, Bronė, who was three years older than me, had a hard time learning to read, so when my parents  taught her the letters, I learned too. Everyone told my father that I was ready to go to school, but that autumn the school was moved to a place three km away. My father didn’t let me go. ‘You are too small to walk,’ he said. I was very short then. When I was nine he finally let me go to school.

“If I knew as much as my father knew about history, about geography, I’d be so happy with myself. He did not need a map. He knew all the islands, all the states. He had an incredibly bright mind. All the village people came to him to talk, to seek advice. During the Smetona era an university education cost a lot. In my village there were only two students: My cousin and another young man. When they had vacation, they always came to see my father. My father had read all the cursed texts and all the sacred texts. In the evenings when we did our work indoors, our father would sit and read out loud to us. I remember him reading us Cervantes’ “Don Quixote.” I still remember entire scenes from “Don Quixote.” They’ve stuck in my head. We used to sit until late at night discussing “Don Quixote.”

“My father taught us all how to dance. He taught us how to play cards. Three neighbors would come over and my father would invite me to be the fourth. After I was arrested, my mother and father were arrested and sent to Siberia. They took my father away on a stretcher since he was already an invalid then, paralyzed. They shoved him with the entire stretcher into the cattle car and took him to Siberia to die. My mother had a chance to run away, but she didn’t. She remained at my father’s side. My mother died a few months after she came home from Siberia. I just missed seeing her for the last time by a few weeks. I was back from prison, but I was afraid to go to her too soon because it would have caused trouble for her. It breaks my heart to know that because of my work, I destroyed our home.”

Leonora paused a moment to collect herself.

“Because she was a liaison woman, they punished the family,” Virginia whispered to me, “that was so typical those days.”

Leonora continued her story:

“In 1940 when I was 17, I was studying at the Agricultural School. During the October Revolution festivities they forced all of us to march in the parade. All of us students walked past the tribune silently with our heads turned away. We did not shout, ‘Hurrah!’ like we were supposed to.

“I got along well with the teacher in charge of our class. I asked her, ‘Will you join my for tea this evening?’  I baked some rolls. While I kept the teacher busy, the boys took down the portrait of Stalin and the hammer and sickle and shoved it down the toilet. This was our first act of resistance against the Soviet Union. There were interrogations after that. No one told. Our director was against the Soviet Union just like we were.

“People waited for the Germans like salvation. In 1941 a lot of people were deported to Siberia. The intellectuals and the rich people. That was why people were waiting for the Germans; they believed the Germans would save them from the deportations.

“On June 21 the war began. Three of us girls were lying in one dorm room. The director opened the door and told us, ‘Girls, hurry up and dress, come outside.’ He took us to the orchard. He led us up a hill and pointed in the direction of the city of Tauragė. The city was burning. He was so happy. He spun each of us around in joy. ‘Girls, the war has begun!’ he called out.

“But I knew about the war already. My father had told me that on Sunday the war would begin. Our neighbor had a radio transmitter and a pair of earphones. He and my father listened to the news from abroad. The director told us we could go home. The boys took the shovels and dug some trenches for us to hide in if bombings started. We were laughing and having fun when a local Jewish man spotted us and said, ‘What? You’re waiting for the Germans?’ He pulled out a pistol and pointed it at us. We ran away. There was no anti-Semitism in Lithuania before the war. The war stirred things up. In 1940 many of the Jews from our village went to work for the NKVD. A Jewish classmate of mine went to work as a secretary in the local NKVD interrogation office. During the German occupation I helped her hide and I brought her food. When the Russians came back, she went back to work for the NKVD.

“During the German occupation the Red partisans showed up. Our neighbor had a tie with the Red Partisans. During the winter of 1941-42 I went into his kitchen and I saw that everyone was acting scared. I asked what happened. They signaled to me to be quiet. A man came out and showed us that the Red partisans were inside the parlor. During the day they hid there. They didn’t stay out in the barn, no, they lived inside the house like gentlemen. Then, they’d go out at night and lay mines on the roads. In our village we only had two communists who actively supported the Red partisans. There was our neighbor Šerksys and then there was this man who drank a lot and because of it lived very poorly. Otherwise, no one supported their cause.

“The Red partisans stopped by our house a few times. If you wanted to or not, you had to let them stay until evening and you had to feed them three meals. If you didn’t feed them, they’d shoot you. Those were the times. It was the same thing with the green partisans. If they came, you had to shelter them and feed them. Until they forced people into the collective farms, people happily supported the green partisans.”

“Leonora,” I asked, “how did you first get involved with the green partisans?”

“It all started during the German occupation with our neighbors the Žukauskas family. The Germans came to their house to ask for horses, eggs, butter in exchange for  chocolate. Šerksys, who was a Communist and supported the Red Partisans, lived next door. He saw the Germans in the Žukauskas’s yard and began running into the woods. The Germans were immediately suspicious that this man had begun to run and demanded that the Žukauskas boys chase him down and catch him for them. The boys obeyed, but without enthusiasm. They had no intention of handing their neighbor over into the hands of the Germans. They purposefully ran slowly and tripped and fell, so that their neighbor could get away.

“When the Russians came in 1944, Šerksys immediately went to the Russians and told them that the Žukauskas boys had tried to turn him in to the Germans. The Russians arrested Petras and Jonas Žukauskas. They kept them prisoner in a manure shed. All the prisoners lay in the manure together. There were so many of them crammed in there, that there wasn’t enough room for all of them. They lay on top of each other, like that, in the manure.

“In the beginning of March 1945 the prisoners broke out of the manure shed and ran away. They were afraid to go home, so they came to us. We hid them for a few days and told their parents. My brother worked in the meat factory in Vilkaviškis. Petras was older and Steponas had an effeminate face. We dressed Steponas as a woman and took him to hide with my brother in Tauragė. My brother could help him get papers. Then, Steponas and Petras decided they would go into the forest. Then Jonas joined with them too. The very youngest, the fourth brother, was still little and stayed home. That is how our tie with the forest brothers began.

“My sister Bronė and I resolved we would go into the forest to help the forest brothers. And, we were curious. We said to each other, ‘We’ve got to go into the forest and take a look and see if the partisans are there for real.’ We hitched the horse as though we were collecting logs and drove out into the forest to look for the partisans. Two men dressed like civilians with guns stopped us. We said, ‘If you need help or food, we can help you.’ That was April 1945. That is how it all began. The partisans would come to us and we would feed them. Soon we were working for Žemaitis as liaison girls. He came to our home in the summer of 1945. Then the units began. Danilevičius would come with his unit. Then the units joined together into a rinktinė, a platoon. Then our partisan district was formed.

“It was a rare night that the partisans were not at our house starting from 1945. They made me the head of the economics department. That meant I collected money for them, food, supplies. I’d find them safe places to stay. Vaitkus worked under me. We would have fun. The men liked to pass us notes, just for fun. They’d shake your hand and slip a note into your palm. It was all silly nonsense, but it made life interesting. I remember when Jonas Nauboras came to us from the Tauragė jail. He later became a Solokov soldier, a traitor. Juozas Nausėda came along with him. The two of them were friends. Nausėda would shake hands with me and I would feel a note in his hand: a letter. Jonas Nauboras drew well, so he always drew something on the corner of every letter.  Nausėda would end every letter with a short motto. There’s one I still remember.”

Leonora paused, drew in her breath, and began to recite: “Na eime duokš ranka vakaras pasakyk sudiev baigęs degti žeries ugniakurias žvygstles krentanti žvaigzdė.”

(Come now, give me your hand, it is evening, bid farewell, the fires in the skies have burned themselves out, a falling star blazes.)

Leonora waved her hand dismissively, “It was all in good fun,” she said.

“Were you afraid to walk the forests alone at night?” I asked.

“The first time I was afraid, but after that I was never again afraid to walk the forests at night. That’s because if you met up with someone in the forest at night you knew it had to be a partisan. You had to fear the wild boar, the wolves, but not the partisans.”

“You worked closely with Žemaitis. Can you tell me what he was like as a person?” I asked.

“Žemaitis was a rare individual,” Leonora answered. “Žemaitis was a very special person. He had a quality about him that made him different from other people. He was extremely sensitive, especially when it came to helping others. Žemaitis was also a very disciplined man. He never allowed anyone in his unit to misbehave. The entire activity was illegal and there was no room for abuse of power within it. But even if Žemaitis wanted everything to go well, things didn’t always work out the way they should. The problem was that the type of people who never should have been partisans would come and join the ranks. These types committed abuses in the name of the partisans. There were many punishments as a result. Many people were arrested who had worked for both sides. Our neighbor was supposedly a liaison point. When I was arrested, I found out that from the very beginning our own neighbor had been working for the KGB.”

Leonora paused a moment, then added, “Žemaitis  seemed so old and serious to me.”

“But was he really that old?” Virginia said. “When you began working for him in 1945, he had to have been 36.”

“No, that can’t be,” Leonora said, flustered, “he was much older than that.”

“But it was, if he was born in 1909,” I said, “he was 36 in 1945.”

Leonora looked confused.

“You were twenty at the time,” I said, “so of course a man who was 36 must have seemed old to you.”

Leonora burst out laughing.

“Oh my, that’s certainly true,” she said, “everybody called him Dėdukas because he was like an older uncle to us. Really, he was so serious, he seemed very old to me then. My father used to say, ‘He is the only serious man among all of them. The other ones are shepherd boys compared to him!’”

“What rules were there for liaison girls?” I asked.

“When my sister and I began our liaison work, mostly it was girls, it was safer that way. We were told very strictly by Žemaitis: no love affairs, no flirtations, nothing like that, but,” Leonora paused and let out at long sigh, “at our age, it just didn’t work out that way.”

Virginia and I burst out laughing. Leonora caught on to our laughter and quickly added, “In my time relationships were different than now.”

“How?” I asked.

“Relationships didn’t go all the way to sex.”

I thought to myself, perhaps that is why their love went deeper? Sex was a commitment. When it happened, it really meant something.

Leonora paused to take a sip of tea and offered us chocolate. We had sat down to tea in the early evening, but now it was ten thirty and the sun was beginning to set. The room was growing slowly darker, but Leonora seemed reluctant to flip on the lights. She stood and opened a bureau drawer. She pulled out a few candles and set them on the table. She lit them and continued her talk:

“At the time Žemaitis was hiding out around Kryžkalnis. My routes were Aukštaitija, northern Lithuania, Klaipėda. Rožė Jankevičiūte went in the other direction. We never knew any last names. The less you knew the better. My code names were: Remigija, Vida. They’d say, ‘Let’s go see Remike.’ I became Vida in the spring of 1947 after I left home. Even my interrogator called me Vida. In the summer of 1948 Dalgis, the head of liaison for the Žemaitis headquarters, said to me, ‘Chose a written code name.’ ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘You need to have one,’ he said. I chose: Radvilaitė. After Rožė Jankevičiūtė was arrested, Žemaitis told me to change my code name to one that Rožė did not know in case they tortured my code name out of her. When someone from our unit was arrested, it was important to go into hiding within two weeks, in case they couldn’t hold out under torture. I chose Samanė (moss) and as soon as I chose it a thought came into my head: With this code name you will turn into moss yourself. And I was right. Not long after that I was arrested. Though, I did last for three and a half years without getting caught.”

I asked Leonora if she knew of a certain liaison woman in Žemaitija.

Leonora let out a hearty laugh, “After independence, everyone wants to be considered a liaison for Žemaitis. I read the stories and I have a good laugh over them. Now, when it’s safe, everybody wants to be a hero. In our headquarters there were three liaison girls: Me, Bronė, Rožė and after Rožė’s arrest, Pliupytė. Although, I do know that there were many legitimate liaison girls in the area whom I do not know. We were not supposed to know people’s last names. It was safer that way. The way the operation was structured was that first you had the būrys, a small number of people in a Unit, then several Units made up a kuopa, which was a larger Unit, several of those Units were called a rinktinė, or platoon. Several platoons made up an apygarda, a military district. It’s possible that the woman you know of was a liaison girl for the platoon. I was a liaison for the headquarters unit, so it’s quite possible I never had anything to do with her.

“What was it like in the beginning?” I asked.

“In the beginning of 1945 the partisans walked freely among the farms. I can see it as though it were today: I can see them with their green uniforms walking openly through the village, not hiding, as though it were nothing at all.

“At first, in 1945 and in the beginning of 1946, the Russians sent border guards to catch the greens. They never shot at them. They would walk across the forests, carrying their guns, but they didn’t do anything. When the border police couldn’t find anyone, the Russians took them away and sent in the Soviet Security forces. That’s when the serious fighting began.

“When did you leave home and join the partisans in the forest?” I asked.

“In 1947 Žemaitis came with his men to our house and told me I had to leave my home. He said that partisans who have been arrested have talked about me. I said I thought maybe it would be better for them to arrest me from my home. It might be easier for me to talk my way out of it that way. But Žemaitis said no, and then he said, ‘If you’re not going to leave on your own, then we are going to take you with us.’ That was when I promised to leave first thing in the morning. That night he gave me a mission.

I had to walk 12 kilometers to Viduklė. There I had to go to a farm where there would be a cart filled with weapons. I had to hitch some horses from the farm to the cart and drive it two km to Raseiniai, where I would deliver the weapons. In total that night I had to cover 25 km. After I unloaded the weapons at a liaison point in Raseiniai, I had to return the horses and the cart to Viduklė. That was when I said, ‘No, enough is enough. I’ll leave the horse and cart in Raseiniai and walk back.’ Žemaitis backed down and said, ‘Alright then, leave the horses.’

“That time I was really scared. I got to the farm and I found the cart and I saw that the weapons were only carelessly covered over with a handful of straw. At night the dirt roads were frozen and the wheels rattled and creaked and the weapons clanked against each other. I thought that everybody had to hear it for kilometers around. I thought, if someone caught me now, there was no way out, the entire cart was filled with weapons and I had no explanation. I completed my mission. I went home. I ate breakfast with my parents. Then I took the few things I had and I left home. Žemaitis had told me where I needed to go and I went. From the spring of 1947 onwards my illegal life began.”

“How did you live then?” I asked.

“Ach,” Leonora said, waving her hand, “the forest is no place for a woman. A woman’s hygiene is completely different from a man’s. A life outdoors is very hard on a woman. I either lived in the forest in the partisan camp or I lived in train wagons or in trucks. Or I would sleep in people’s houses. You’d go there with a message and you’d say you are staying the night and they’d show you a place where you could sleep. Often, I’d battle fleas all night long. Very often the NKVD came hunting for bandits. Then the people would say, ‘She’s our relative.’

“Once in Aukštaitija, NKVD soldiers came and ransacked the house where I was hiding, searching for bandits. I was lying in bed. I shouted out to them, “Ooh, look behind me, you might just find something.” The dummies ran over and picked up the blanket and looked for real. I liked to joke around with them. I liked to laugh and play tricks. I was young, you know.

“I often went and rested and washed up at my cousin’s farm. When I could, I’d take Rožė Jankevičiūtė with me. Once I was there and they came looking for bandits at the Dobrovolksis’s farm. I was sitting on the bed. I called out to them, ‘I’m a bandit! Take me!’ The soldiers laughed, waved their hands at me dismissively, and walked out. My uncle said later, ‘My hair stood on end when you said that.’

“One time in 1947 I came on bicycle to a liaison point, to a house with two ends, with a family living in each end. The contact had said to me time and again, ‘Be careful of the woman at the other end, you can’t trust her.’ So, this time I arrived with letters in my pockets. I always had with me a bag with needles, thread, and other things so that if caught, I could pretend I was a spekuliantė walking among the villages, selling things. I set my bicycle against the wall of the house. I looked inside. I saw a soldier. He grabbed my hand and pulled me inside. I said, ‘There is a woman here who owes me 200 rubles.’ Luckily, there was a woman sitting on the bed inside who’d already been arrested. There were a lot of soldiers in there and they had a machine gun. They didn’t take me into that end, but dragged me into the end with the woman who I’d been warned was untrustworthy. There were other people there. They said they’d been traveling by horse and had stopped by and were arrested. Maybe they had come to pick up the letters I was bringing? I did not know because it was always better not to know too much.

“I sat down at the table and took out the sweater I was working on and began to knit. The soldier grabbed my ball of yarn and tossed it at me and said, ‘Banditka!’ I shrieked, ‘How dare you! I’m insulted! Call the boss, how dare you call me by that name!’ He began apologizing, ‘Nichevo, nichevo. It’s nothing. Just forget it.’ I started to bawl as if I’d been mortally insulted. He got up and left me alone. The woman who was supposedly untrustworthy walked by me then and said, ‘I’m going to heat up oatmeal for my child, throw what you have in the stove.’ I thought to myself that this might be a provocation. This was the woman I’d been warned not to trust. But in that situation I had no choice. I decided that instant to trust her. I followed her to the stove. Quickly, I tore up the letters and tossed them into the stove. She tossed some straw on top, then banged the lid down and began heating up the oatmeal. When the soldier noticed us by the stove, he came rushing over and began poking around in the ashes, but by that time everything had burned up. ‘What were you doing at the stove?’ the soldier barked at the woman. ‘Making oatmeal for my child,’ the woman answered.

“The soldier told her to make up a bed for us and for the man and woman who’d also been apprehended. The woman must have said that someone was coming and now they were going to spend the night and wait. I lay down on the bed on the floor. I lay with my head in the opposite direction from them, but I couldn’t fall asleep. I shut my eyes and only pretended to sleep. In the middle of the night two bosses came in. They stood next to me and said to each other in Russian, ‘If she’s sleeping, it’s not her. If she’s not sleeping, it’s her.’

“As a young girl I had a very carefree nature. But in times of danger I could be very serious. I breathed in and out calmly, pretending to be sleeping. They stood there beside me and began telling jokes. I was tempted to laugh every time I heard the punch line. I kept thinking to myself, I am going to start laughing. But I kept my breathing steady. Finally, they said, ‘It’s not her.’ The woman who had helped me burn the letters said, ‘Let me turn off the light, so my child can sleep.’ They allowed her to turn out the light and then I had time to plan my escape.

“I thought to myself, I have a knife in my pocket. I have a head scarf. I tied the scarf on my head. I quietly got up and slipped into the corridor. The corridor was empty. I opened the door to the yard. I saw a soldier with a machine gun out in the yard. It was the same soldier who had tossed me my ball of yarn. ‘Where are you going?’ he demanded. ‘I need to use the outhouse,’ I said.  He said, ‘Do it here.’ I gasped and said, ‘Oh my, no, you are a young man and I’m a young woman. Besides, if I do it here, it’ll smell for you.’ I knew the lay of the land around this house. I knew there was an outhouse on a hill with a cherry tree beside it. Behind the outhouse there were open fields. If I could only get to the outhouse, I could run away through the fields. ‘You can see the outhouse from here,’ I said, ‘I won’t close the door.’ He agreed to that. I trotted over to the outhouse, opened the door wide, and quickly slipped behind the door, out of his line of vision. I took off running up the hill. I ran across the street and towards a yard where I knew there was a vicious dog that would be an obstacle. But that night I ran across that yard and the dog didn’t even bark. I jumped into a ditch alongside the road. I knew every 100 meters there would be piles of stones in the irrigation ditch. I ran and jumped over those piles of stones like a deer. When the moon rose, I lay down, when a shadow passed over the moon, I ran.

“I made it to a safe house where I spent the night. There I met up with Žemaitis. It turned out that the woman I’d been told not to trust was also his liaison woman. Only, to keep things safe, my liaison point at the opposite end of the house didn’t know it.

“Eventually, in April 1948 my sister Bronė had to leave home too. I had to bring Bronė to Žvalgaitis’s platoon to work. For several days in a row I had kept dreaming one and the same dream: I am walking along the road. A horse and wagon enter the road. On one side of the road there is a rye field, then I am running and running into the rye and I then I wake up. I told my sister there would be a problem, but it ought to end well. My documents were in order and so were hers. This partisans would take the papers of a Communist youth girl who had been shot for treason and they’d remove her photograph and glue in a liaison girl’s photograph in its place. Then they’d put the Communist seal on top of the photograph. Those were the types of documents they’d given me and my sister to carry that day. That Saturday, just like in my dream, we were walking on the road when a horse and wagon entered the road. They stopped us. The soldiers in the wagon demanded to see our documents. Everything was in order with my documents. We had documents from different places and we pretended we’d just met. But when Bronė tried to open up her document, the pages were stuck together. As she was standing there, ungluing the pages, the boss came along in another long cart. He stopped to see what was going on. He took Bronė’s documents from her and pulled open the pages. ‘So, look, where you’ve turned up,” he said, “You’ve risen from the dead.’

“It turned out that he had known the Communist girl who’d been shot and whose documents my sister was now using. He seated Bronė in the wagon beside him and put me in the other wagon. They took us to a house for interrogation. We told them we had met on the road and that we were looking for a collective farm where we could get work as milk maids. When they took me into a room to question me, I would talk loud so that Bronė could hear me from the hallway. But when they questioned her, I couldn’t hear her. We tried to keep our stories straight. Then they brought in an older man to question us. This man said he was from Tauragė. I had said earlier that I was from Tauragė and now I had to prove it to him. I knew a few street names because my brother worked there, so I worked my tongue. They held onto us. But I knew from my dream that the rye was ahead of us. I whispered to Bronė that I was going to make a run for it. I told her she should too. Outside the sun was shining bright. It was a beautiful May day. The man from Tauragė said that the bosses were on their way from Panevėžys. I told him I needed to use the outhouse. He told me to do my business right there. I said, ‘Can I at least go in the bushes where you can see me.’ He told me to go. Just as I got beyond the veranda a truck full of bosses arrived and everyone was distracted. I quickly ran behind the barn and I waited for Bronė, but she didn’t come. I thought to myself, if I go back there I wouldn’t get another chance. And so I began to run. I saw the rye ahead of me, like in my dream. Beyond the rye it was potatoes, and then the road, and then rye again. When I made it into the rye a second time, I bent over and ran as fast as I could. When I came out, I heard the church bells ringing.

“Later, my sister told me that when the man came in and realized I was missing, he called his boss and told them to apprehend me. They told them how I was dressed. I slept over with people that night and I met with Žvalgaitis the next day. I told him my sister had been arrested. ‘You have to set her free,’ I said. ‘We are only a few men,’ he said, ‘it’s too dangerous.’ They kept my sister four days and released her on the fifth day. They let her go and told her to tell her friend to come pick up her documents.”

Leonora paused to pour us another round of tea. “You know,” she said, “even now, as I’m driving along in a bus or a train, I gaze out at the forests passing by and I look for routes. I look to see where the forest is thicker, where it is bare, where I could hide if I needed to. It is a habit that stays with you. When the Russian troops attacked the television tower in Vilnius on Jan. 13, 1991, I’d just gotten out of the hospital after a heart attack. I quickly went outside, did some repairs on my Zhiguli, and drove to Vilnius. I stayed in Vilnius a while demonstrating with the protesters and then began heading home. As I was driving along the highway to Kaunas I heard on the radio that Vytautas Landsbergis was warning the people that troops were preparing to attack Kaunas. I pulled off onto the shoulder and sat there listening to the radio for more information. I said to myself, ‘This is my profession. If they need me, I am going to Kaunas to work as a liaison.’”

“Have you been acknowledged for your heroism?” Virginia asked.

“I received three honors from the Kęstutis district for my work. I received a thank you letter, a letter of honor, and a badge of honor. All three. I don’t have them anymore. They’re gone. When I received the first letter of honor in 1946 with Kasparavičius’s signature on it, they brought it to me and read it out loud in a ceremonial manner. I felt very bad. I thought to myself, why? Why is this necessary? This is not the reason why I was working.

“I don’t like it even now when former political prisoners complain and demand all sorts of benefits for their suffering. Who needs it? We did what we did because we had to at the time. We lived in a time when it was not possible to be neutral. You had to chose one side or the other. It was either black or white.

“When the traitor Markulis sent Zaskevičius to us to organize the centralization of command, we walked 25 kilometers together. As we were walking Zaskevičius asked me,

‘Why are you working? Because you like it? Or out of idealism?’ I thought to myself, that’s a provocation. I was surprised at him, but I replied, ‘I would find something better to do, if I were doing this because I liked it. Of course, I am working out of idealism.’ I regret now that I didn’t tell Žemaitis about that conversation. I suspected that Zaskevičius was a traitor even then. He was later arrested in Kaunas and he betrayed us. I don’t blame him as much as I do the smogikai (former partisans who were arrested and tortured and agreed to work for the NKVD. They would return to their units and betray or execute their former comrades). I didn’t know them, but Zaskevičius I did know. The Russians gauged out his eye and there was gossip that he was told, either work with us or we will shoot you. He stayed and worked for the NKVD with an eye missing. He even made statements about us sisters in a book written in 1956. The book was called “The Bloody Footsteps of the Bandits.”

“By 1948 Žemaitis tried to publish as much press as possible. We saw then that it was the end. I had to provide paper, ink, matrices and then deliver the press around the district. One time we ran out of matrices and couldn’t get any. Žemaitis looked at me. I was wearing a white blouse. He said, ‘Get in the bushes.’ I did. I took off my blouse and I brought it to him.  The print came out not quite as good as with real matrices, but good enough.”

“What kept you going?” I asked.

“Those days, the radio constantly made announcements in Russian that the Americans were coming: next week, next month, in a few weeks. And we believed it. We were fooled. If we had known the Americans weren’t going to come, we would have done things differently. Now we know that the Russians put out this misinformation on purpose so that more people would die in the forests.”

“Can you tell me about your first husband, the partisan Bronius Liesius?” I asked.

“I knew him for a long time among the partisans,” Leonora said, “but our friendship only deepened much later. He was a twin and he wrote the leading article for Laisvės Varpas (Freedom Bell), our district’s underground newspaper. Bronius’s codename was Kaukas (a mischievous forest spirit). He was a gentle, artistic person. He had been trained as a paratrooper in Germany in 1944. He was dropped here to meet up with the Germans. Once he touched Lithuanian soil, he deserted. He went and found the partisans and joined with them instead. The war wasn’t over yet then. It was 1944. Winter. When Bronius told me about it, I trembled. They were surrounded when they came down and had to fight their way out.

“Our friendship started out of nothing. He’d be out fighting in battles. I’d see him around. One time, I went to one liaison point, and the farmer had an accordion. He started to play. The partisans stood up and danced. Bronius was wearing a coat, although we were indoors. He was sitting alone on the bench, not dancing. I grabbed his hand and said, ‘Come, I’ll dance with you.’ We began to dance. We danced more and more and I could see it was hot for him, but he wouldn’t take off his coat. I told him, ‘Take off your jacket, you’re hot.’ “No, no, no,’ he insisted. Later, he confided in me that he couldn’t take off his coat because the seam of his pants were torn.”

Leonora burst out laughing over the memory of that dance.

“When were you married?” I asked.

“There was no such thing as marriage in the forest,” Leonora said, “How could there be? It was not possible to get any kind of documentation. We became man and wife, so to speak, the weekend after Easter in 1948. It was a calm time, so we had a small celebration out in the forest. Žemaitis never drank, but that one time he allowed beer for his men. Someone brought us a keg of beer into the forest. That night, you might say, I drank my virginity away. From then on, Bronius and I became very close. Žemaitis knew we considered ourselves married and he honored our bond. Everyone in the unit knew. The next morning, everyone congratulated us. We lived the way young people live today.”

Leonora paused, musing to herself, “I remember Bronius would say, ‘We’ll have no less than five children, but no more than seven,’ and that would make me laugh.”

Leonora nodded her head, as though in confirmation, “He was a good man. Bronius. Once we were talking and talking and I decided that I would test his character. He was saying something and I got stubborn and said, ‘No, I don’t agree.’ He was actually right, but I wanted to test him. I pretended that I was crying in the dark. He reached over to touch my face. I quickly licked my hand and in the darkness. I wet my face. He stroked my face and said, ‘Don’t cry. Everything will be as you wish.’ I knew then that he was a sincere, kind, and gentle man.

“Oh, but life in the forest is not for women,” Leonora said. “A woman needs water every day. I knew that there was a ditch a little further off. I would run to the ditch and pull off my clothes and bathe. One svoloch from the partisan camp would watch me through his binoculars. He told me himself later. He bragged to me, ‘I’m not surprised that Bronius loves you that much.’ I said, ‘How do you know?’ He said, ‘I watched you bathing in the ditch.’

“Bronius and I would play chess at camp between assignments. Just when I was about to win, he’d turn the chessboard around so I’d get another chance. He always would lead me to the edge of the forest when I left on an assignment. We would walk with our pinkies locked together. The last time we saw each other, he said to me, ‘Leoniuk, just be careful not to get caught.’ I said to him, ‘I’ll come back, even from Russia, but you just save yourself.’ Those were our last words to each other. After that he was dead. After that, we only spoke to each other in my dreams. We were together six months.

“Years later, when I was in prison in Magadan, a Lithuanian girl found me and told me she had been a liaison woman. She had delivered a message to the Unit in which Bronius was fighting. She remembered she spent the night with that Unit. She remembered that all the men were friendly and talkative, except for one. That one sat alone and was very quiet, brooding, as though he were lost to the world. She asked the men what was wrong with him and they told her, ‘His girl is in prison.’ That had been Bronius.”

“How were you captured?”

“Žemaitis told me that for 10,000 rubles the fishermen in Klaipėda could take a person across to Sweden and for 15,000 rubles they could take two. In 1948 Žemaitis was setting up plans to transport our headquarters to Gotland, so that we could operate in exile. Žemaitis told me, ‘You and Bronius will be the first two to go to Sweden.’

“The next morning I was to go to Klaipėda to make arrangements for mine and Bronius’s departure. The evening before, I had to deliver one last letter in Lithuania before we would leave. That evening I was arrested.

“That time was the first time that I did not listen to Dargys. How I regret that I didn’t listen to his instructions! He told me that I had to deliver the letter and come directly back, that I shouldn’t stop anywhere. Rožė had already been arrested. Bronė too. There were so few of us left. We had to get out to Sweden.

“But I told him that on the way back from Panevėžys I would stop at one liaison point to leave some money for a partisan there. Marytė Miksaitė had been arrested. I had to leave money with her lover, so that he could pass it on to her mother to buy her food to bring to the prison. Dargys said, ‘Don’t stop. Don’t go. You are the only one left. We need you.’ But I didn’t listen to him. I thought, how can I not help my friends at this time? What I didn’t know was that a liaison girl named Audronė had told the NKVD absolutely everything about our activities. She had brought them to that liaison point and they were waiting for me. Immediately, they arrested me. They had all the information on me. I couldn’t defend myself.

“That was the evening of Dec. 8, 1948. The fields were frozen. They tied up my arms and yanked me along behind the wagon. I followed after the wagon, stumbling through the frozen fields. My bare legs were shredded and bloody by the time we reached the road two kilometers away. On the road a car was waiting. In the car they brought me to the NKVD prison in Skaudvilė. Then, they didn’t ask me anything. They just beat me. I was covered in bruises. Captain Kaplan was the interrogator. He barked at me, ‘Take off your clothes.’ I said nothing. So, he said to the soldiers, ‘Take off all her clothes. I want her naked.’ I didn’t want them to rip my clothing off of me and shred everything, so I took off everything except for my bra and panties. I said to them, ‘These rags won’t save me from the pain, but you won’t take these rags from me until my eyes no longer see the light of day.’

“Kaplan ordered me to lean over a tabouret. He lifted a soldier’s belt with a heavy metal belt buckle up high in the air, but in the time before the belt came down, I’d roll off the tabouret onto the floor and the belt would come crashing down onto the wooden tabouret. Kaplan ordered the soldiers to take the tabouret away. Then he ordered for me to lean over the sofa. I did the same thing again. I kept rolling. Kaplan cursed and screamed at me. He ordered the soldiers to take every piece of furniture out of the room and leave it bare. I said to Kaplan then, ‘I thought your government was humanitarian.’ He said, ‘Our government is humanitarian to humans, but not to pigs. We even kill pigs if we need to.’

“And he began beating me so hard that he cut my skin into chunks. The entire time, I repeated to myself, ‘Holy Mary, give me strength. Holy Mary, give me strength.’ When he was finished, my panties were shredded. My back was shredded down to the nerves. When he was finished, I looked up and saw that he was dripping in sweat. Then I thought with satisfaction: So, you snake, you tired yourself out on my back.

“After that they brought me to the prison in Kaunas. They walked me down Laisvės Alėja. My legs and back hurt terribly. I was limping. I kept looking around for an opportunity to run away. All around me people were going about their daily routines as though it were nothing at all. They took me to the prison and that is how my life as a prisoner began.

“They threw me in the cell. There were 12 women in the cell already and I was the 13^th. They put me in the shower cell. I’d had a permanent wave done before I was captured. The steam in the shower curled my hair into tight ringlets. One woman, who’d been a teacher, looked at me and asked, ‘How old are you?’ I told her I was born in 1923. She said in a disgust, looking at my ringlets, ‘You’re a baby pretending to be a woman.’ And that was when I cried for the first time. I was already 25 and she did not believe I was a grown woman. The beating did not make me cry, but those words did.”

“I was imprisoned in Kaunas for two weeks before they shipped me to the prison in Vilnius and then by cattle car to Magadan. They knew I’d been to Steponaitis and they knew what I’d brought there. They read the letter to me. I knew then I’d been betrayed.

They beat me like crazy. They’d seat me not far from the wall and then they’d take my head and slam it into the wall. For eighteen years after that my head hurt me constantly.

“They had a thick book they kept up on the cabinet. It was the Lithuanian encyclopedia with leather covers. The interrogator would take down the book and open it up to the page where there was a photograph of Mrs. Smetona, the president’s wife. They’d shove the book in my face and ask me, ‘Is that who you wanted to be?’ Then they’d whack the book against my head.”

Leonora paused mid-stream and began to laugh from the absurdity of being whacked in the head with the Lithuanian encyclopedia. Wiping tears of laughter from her eyes, she composed herself and continued her story:

“One time during interrogations the room got foggy. I knew they had a method where they let in gas and a person loses his will. Whatever they ask, the person answers. I kept repeating to myself, ‘I won’t faint, I won’t faint, I’ll hold on.’ The interrogator left and went out into the corridor. Others kept coming and going. ‘I won’t faint, I’ll hold on, I won’t faint,’ I repeated to myself. Then Interrogator Genezav pulled out a mirror and shoved it in my face.  ‘Who do you look like?’ he demanded. In that mirror I saw a person I did not recognize. My face was bright yellow. My eyes were circled with blue. My lips were red. When they saw how yellow I was, they opened the door and let in some air. After that, they didn’t ask about Steponaitis anymore. I had erased his address out of my head. I kept repeating to myself all throughout interrogations that I didn’t know the address, and then, I actually forgot the address. If you asked me for the address now, I couldn’t tell you. Funny what the mind can do?” Leonora mused.

“First I was sent to Buchtavan, there was a concentration camp there called Muchka where the locals would come and buy us for various types of slave labor. My back was beaten and so was my backside. I couldn’t sit down. I had a thin wool scarf. I would cover my back with the scarf and lean up against the wall, propping myself up like that. But the walls were cold and damp. The cold went into my lungs and I began to cough. I became quite sick. At the slave labor point in Muchka they gave us some fish soup and the soup made me very sick. They called in a doctor and she allowed me one day to lie down. They never allowed you to lie down unless you were very sick. So, that meant I was quite sick. I’d lost a lot of weight.

“I’d cough and my side would hurt from coughing. I went to the medical point and asked for something to take for the cough. The nurse brought a thermometer. I said I’m just coughing, I don’t need a thermometer. Those are the rules, she said. She brought two thermometers and put them under my arms, to make sure. It turns out the prisoners would rub off the lines with the numbers, so they could get out of work. My fever was 43.5°C. When she told me, that was when I really felt sick for the first time. They called an ambulance and brought me to the city hospital. They began to treat me for pleuritis. They gave me so much medicine that I could barely walk. A free person would not have suffered through it, but a prisoner suffers everything.

“While I was lying in the hospital I found out that they were shipping all the women prisoners further. I was frightened that I’d be separated from my sister Bronė who’d been deported in the cattle car together with me. I was a good knitter, and while in the hospital in Muchka I knit for the doctor. She liked me for that. She said to me, ‘I’ll keep you here. You can be a cleaning woman.’ I said, ‘No, no, I can’t stay. They’re taking my sister away. I have to go. I’ll sign myself out.’ The doctor was shocked and insulted that I could refuse such a good offer. To be a cleaning woman in a hospital at the time for a prisoner was a very good job. She called me dura and said, ‘You are very stupid for not taking advantage of my offer.’ But even though I was still sick I rushed back to the labor camp because I could not bear being separated from my sister. When I got there I lay down and I had a high fever. While I struggled with the fever, they took Bronė away from me. I heard that they’d put her on a boat heading for Magadan.

“A few days later there was a roll call in the cafeteria. There was another boat of prisoners going to Magadan and I wanted to get on it and catch up to my sister. They called everyone’s name except for mine. I sat there and cried. I went to the man calling out the names and cried desperately that I had to be on that boat. But he said, ‘No, your name is not on the list’ and that was that.

“Three days later they told us that there were places in one boat going in the same direction. They had 54 spaces. I prayed that I’d get a spot and I did. It turned out that the doctor had accidentally sent my records to the other camp in Muchka. That was why my name wasn’t on the first list. But I was a second class invalid. I went to the boat in the night. The one who wouldn’t take me before, recognized me. ‘See you were crying so hard, but now you’re going.’ When we arrived in the hard labor camp in Magadan they locked us up. They only let us out of the barracks to go out to work. I had to figure out how to get to the barrack where my sister was. One day they brought us back from work and I saw a blond Russian woman, a barracks overseer. I asked her in Russian, ‘Are there any Lithuanians in your barrack?’ She answered me with a Russian swear, but she pointed in the direction of Barrack #6. I went inside that barrack and it was very dark. There were tiny lights up high. I kept rubbing my eyes from the darkness, confused, lost, trying to make out the faces among the shadows. Then I heard a woman call out, ‘Leonora!’ It was a Lithuanian girl I knew. She signaled for me to climb up into her bunk and there beside her was Bronė.

“And that is where we stayed until Stalin died in 1953. Then they slowly began to let us go. We worked very hard. The guards would try to get us to inform on each other. Once, the other girls told me that if I went to the guard and asked, I could get a small metal wash basin. That was a precious thing for us prisoners. I went to the guard and I asked for one. He asked me if I could come see him from time to time and tell him things about the other girls in my work brigade. ‘But that’s your job,’ I said, ‘not mine.’ ‘What!’ the guard roared. He aimed his boot for my backside and kicked me out of the guard booth. I went flying out into the arctic night. He shouted curses at me as I stood up and ran away. I never did get my wash basin. But after that that guard respected me. He left me alone. The prisoners who did inform, all of them, eventually ended up out in the tundra, dead.”

Leonora paused in her talk. The candles had burned down to stubs and their wicks were flickering. Leonora gazed at me with her intense blue eyes and said, “I’ve gone through hell in my life, but the entire time I felt God’s blessing was with me. The hard labor camp was my university; it made a human being out of me.”

“What was the most difficult aspect of being in hard labor?” I asked.

Tears came to Leonora’s eyes. Besides the tears of laughter, it was the first time I saw her tears of hurt.

“My eldest sister did not write to me while I was in prison. When I got back to Lithuania I asked Apolinaria why she hadn’t written to me and she told me she’d been afraid. That is what hurt me the most.”

A family member’s betrayal hurt more than hours of beatings with a soldier’s belt or years of hard labor or cold or starvation. One could endure anything, except being pushed away from those who are closest to us.

“What happened to Bronius?” Virginia asked.

“Bronius was killed July 1949. I was in prison. The interrogator called me out into the interrogation cell and shoved a photograph at me. It was a photograph of a pile of corpses. Bronius’s corpse was close to the top. His right tooth was dislodged and there was a hole in his temple. I lost my breath. I couldn’t say anything. Immediately, in that moment, the hair around my temples turned gray. The interrogator was holding more photographs underneath that one, but when he saw my reaction, he knew it was enough. He didn’t show me the rest. He ordered me back to my cell. I lay down on the planks beside Rožė and I told her about what I’d seen. Soon after that the other girls in the cell began saying I was an informant; otherwise, they would not have told me about Bronius and the other men. The girls avoided me after that and that hurt.

“I cried every night. I dreamt him every night and in my dreams I would see the two of us walking to the forest’s edge with our pinkies locked together. And he would say, ‘Don’t cry, Leonora, we will meet again. Don’t cry we will meet again.’ I would dream that dream over and over again until I began to think seriously about Izodor Rubine. Then Bronius left me alone.

“I was released from a prison a year before Izidor, so I waited for him. I went to work in Magadan and rented a room. When Izidor was released we registered together and prepared to return to Latvia. We were given permission to return to Latvia in Autumn of 1956. We were allocated this piece of land here in Jūrmala. As exiles, we were not allowed to live in Riga or in any bigger cities. While we were both working, Izidor working two jobs, we built this house with our own hands. I was pregnant the entire time. It took us three months to lay the foundation and to cement the walls. It took us a year to complete the house; although, we were able to move in after three months.  Izidor and I did all the heavy work ourselves after our work hours. Sometimes his friends came and helped. I remember after work we’d take the train from Riga and then walk the few kilometers from the train station. I’d buy a bag of ribs on the street for a few cents and I’d make them last the week. I’d scrape off the meat and boil up some soup and then prepare the bones. That was all we had to eat. When my daughter was born, she was as pale as a ghost.

“I learned Latvian well and I settled into my life with my children. But I never forgot Bronius. One time I was walking home and I thought to myself, ‘What if I ran into Bronius right now? What would I do?’ Then I thought, ‘I’d stay where I was for the sake of the children.’ Izidor and I lived for 25 years without a church wedding. I talked him into it at one point, but he was reluctant. We always slept at night back to back because our backs hurt less that way. Nights, I’d talk to him and tell him I didn’t feel moral living all these years without a church wedding and having two children out of wedlock. He finally agreed and I went to see the priest and arranged a date.

“The night before the wedding I dreamt that I was falling through clouds and Bronius caught me in his arms. He said, ‘I’ll never let you go. You are mine. I won’t let you go.’ I hadn’t dreamt of Bronius in all those years and now I did. I was shaken. I woke up in the morning and told Izidor I wouldn’t marry him. I told him I wouldn’t go to the church; that the wedding was off. Then, about a year later we went anyway and got married in the church. Soon afterwards God punished me for it. He took away our son. He was thrown from a sixth floor balcony. He was only 23 then. He struggled for a few days and then he died. After that I was in a state of shock. I didn’t want any men near me. I pushed Izidor away. He died a few years later. I’ve lived alone for twenty-five years now. I take care of this house and garden by myself.”

It was past midnight and the sky had turned that pitch-black that happens for only a few hours in mid-summer. Leonora led Virginia and I outside to say good night. We would be spending the night in a guest room attached to the side of the house for summer visitors. We paused in the garden, among the rose bushes, and Leonora looked up at the black sky and said, “My generation lived through a time that was biblical in its nature. There was good and there was evil and there was no gray zone in-between. And every one of us was forced to choose which side we were on. There could be no ambiguity.”

We walked a few more steps through the midnight garden, the moon casting our shadows on the stone walkway. Leonora paused in her tracks and said, “I’ve seen an angel you know. I woke up and she was standing over my bed. She had a perfectly round face. She was shimmering, a beautiful angel with large wings covered in feathers. She had long blond flowing hair. She just stood there gazing down at me. And I gazed up at her.”

Leonora took my hands in her large gnarled hands, “I see the dead sometimes,” she said, gazing into my eyes with her strong blue eyes, “I talk to them in my dreams. They come to me. I see them walking around my house at night.”

We stood there like that. The three of us women, with Leonora’s story, now spoken, in the nighttime air between us, under the expansive sky of stars. We stood there a long while, beside the Latvian rose bushes, each of us, counting our dead and checking our wounds.

The last image I saw of Leonora as Virginia and I pulled out of her driveway in Jūrmala, was Leonora standing in front of the house she’d built with her own two hands, pregnant and still weak after exile to Siberia. The house was still standing twenty-five years later despite their friends‘ predictions that it would cave in on itself after the first wet autumn. I thought, how simple the logic of a former political prisoners is: If we could build anything out of anything out in the tundra and permafrost, then it’s no problem at all to come home and build yourself a house in your own backyard. Furthermore, Virginia and I had agreed that Izidor building the house for him and Leonora was proof of his love for her. It was a way of setting the world right after the world had gone so wrong for their generation. Already approaching middle age and with their health broken, betrayed by their comrades, most of their friends and family dead, both of them outcasts in their native countries, they were building something new: a foundation.

“Did you notice her silk night robe?” Virginia asked as we turned onto Telšu Iela in the direction of Riga. “How elegant she is, even as a woman in her eighties.”

“That is a woman’s strength,” I said, “to never let herself go, not under any circumstances. Did you notice, in the photographs she showed us, the elegance of the coat she had sewn before she left Magadan? And the dress she was wearing? And the photo of her in while still in the concentration camp, wearing a hand knit fitted black and white sweater with a matching short sleeve jacket?”

“And that her husband wore a suit on a train out of Siberia,” Virginia added. “We lost all that under the Soviets. My generation did not know how to dress. First of all, we couldn’t get anything and second of all, they tried to force women into dressing and acting like men. We’d have to wear work coveralls and things like that. I dressed in the typical folklorists outfits when I was young—long plaid skirts to the ground and lumpy sweaters. But that was mostly because I couldn’t get anything else. I made what I could out of what I had.”

Leonora waved to us one last time and headed back into her yard. That morning she’d risen early and exactly at 8 o’clock had a breakfast of bacon and eggs and coffee spread out before us. We had slipped into talk about contemporary politics and that was when I knew it was time for us to go. I wanted to hold onto what we’d had those nights of sitting in the dark with a candles on the table between us, speaking our hearts, tracing the wisdom of fate, of dreams, of ghosts and angels.

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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