I dreamt last night I was hiking across a muddy field with my comrades. We were armed and anticipating an attack. As we walked our feet sank deeper and deeper into the mud. We reached a little house beside the forest and I saw an enormous rose bush growing alongside one of its walls. I thought to myself, “Now I’ll pick some roses for Nijolė, enough to fill three vases.” I dropped my weapon and began gathering armfuls of roses. With my arms overflowing with roses, I followed my comrades into the forest. My mother crossed my path.  “Son,” she said, “what are you doing? Drop those roses and pick up your gun.”

Juozas Lukša, February 7, 1949

Eleonora Labanauskienė stood waiting on the front stoop to her yellow brick farmhouse. She was wearing her Sunday dress, dark blue with white polka dots. A blue silk scarf was knotted loosely across the front. Her neatly combed wavy gray hair blew about in the light breeze. Eleonora was 88.

Dahlias and black-eyed Susans spilled over onto the concrete steps around her feet. The flowers provided a burst of color against the flat grassy plains that stretched towards a line of pine forests in the distance. The sky was blue, yet heavy clouds tinged with gray hung low, close to the horizon line, the threat of rain ever constant.

Lithuanian farmhouses like Eleonora’s, if they escaped being leveled during the Stalin-era collectivization of farms, look the same now as when they were originally built in the 1930s. The typical lay-out consists of a few small rooms with an old-fashioned brick oven dominating the center of the house. Eleonora and her husband, Vincas, built this house together in 1939 shortly after their elopement. At the age of seventeen, the head-strong Eleonora ran across the fields in the dead of night to marry Vincas, a poor farmer who owned only four hectares of land. Eleonora’s parents did not approve of the match. They were wealthy farmers who had made their money in America and, like many Lithuanian-Americans of their generation, had returned to a newly independent Lithuania to put down roots. After the Soviets occupied Lithuania, Eleonora’s parents were exiled to Siberia because of their wealth. They both died there.

Our mini van pulled into Eleonora’s yard. Eighty-two-year-old Nijolė Bražėnaitė-Lukšienė-Paronetto sat perched anxiously on the edge of the front seat. She had flown halfway across the world to meet Eleonora.

Nijolė saw Eleonora first. She did not wait for introductions. She opened the front passenger door of the mini van and walked resolutely towards Eleonora. The two women fell into a tight embrace. Nijolė lay her head on Eleonora’s shoulder. They both cried. They stood like that for a good fifteen minutes.

“I saw you on the news on Thursday,” Eleonora said finally. “When I realized it was you, I got down on my knees. My daughter, Vanda, came running into the room and said, ‘Mama, what’s wrong, get up.’ I told her I’d just seen you on television. You spoke beautifully.”

“They asked me to tell them about Juozas,” Nijolė said. “What could I tell them? Fifty-five years have gone by and it still feels like yesterday when he left. Every day when I awake my first thoughts are about him.”

“It still feels like yesterday for me too,” Eleonora said. “He left my house and walked to his death,” Eleonora said. “When I lay down to sleep at night, my head is filled with thoughts of the time when he and Ramanauskas-Vanagas hid in the bunker in my house.”

*            *            *

On the night of October 3-4, 1950, just as United Nations troops were crossing the 38^th parallel into North Korea, the CIA flew Juozas Lukša and two of his Lithuanian comrades, Trumpys and Širvys, out of Wiesbaden, under the radar, in an unmarked Dakota C-47 painted black and dropped them behind the Iron Curtain to conduct an information-gathering mission. Lukša’s orders were to mobilize the resistance for reconnaissance throughout Lithuania in order to discern whether the Soviets were making preparations for an attack on the West. Lukša carried with him a letter from Mykolas Krupavičius, the head of the Committee for the Restoration of an Independent Lithuania, addressed to the partisans of Lithuania, outlining the current political situation abroad and appealing to the partisans to desist from any form of action that might lead to justifications for further deportations and genocide. Lukša had with him medical supplies, printing supplies, dollars, rubles, złotys, gold-plated Swiss watches and a radio transmitter. Each paratrooper carried with him an automatic weapon with cartridges, a pistol with cartridges, ten watches each, $2,000, and 6,000 rubles. They were dressed in loose American pants and leather jackets. Each of them had a cyanide capsule sewn into the collar of their jackets.

During the post-war era the CIA had set up a training camp in Kaufbeuren, West Germany as part of a CIA sponsored Cold War espionage effort. During 1950-51 the CIA trained resistance fighters from Soviet-occupied East European countries to infiltrate the Soviet Union to gather information in the event of another war with the Soviet Union. CIA-trained East European operatives were flown back into the Soviet Union under the radar with C-47 Dakotas manned by former RAF Czech pilots. Several such airdrops were done in the Baltics and in the Ukraine. These operations in the end were only moderately successful, mainly because of infiltrations by Soviet counter-intelligence.

Lukša and his East European comrades saw the CIA espionage training as an opportunity to enlist the Americans’ help in their nations’ struggles while the Americans used these resistance fighters’ dedication to freedom in their homelands to gain access to information from behind the Iron Curtain.

Nijolė Braženaite met Juozas Lukša in Paris in 1948 not long after Lukša had broken through the Iron Curtain between the postwar Russian Kaliningrad enclave and Poland. Lukša had been appointed as a special representative for the armed resistance in Lithuania and was sent to meet with contacts in Western Europe to describe the resistance’s efforts to fight Soviet oppression in Lithuania and to awaken the consciousness of the democratic world. He carried with him a number of documents and testimonials, including a message in French to the United Nations and a letter in Latin to Pope Pius XII describing the mass deportations of the civilian populace to Siberia and asking for the support of the Catholic Church. Neither of these documents received any significant attention. Not being able to catch the attention of either the United Nations or the Vatican, Lukša instead turned to various intelligence services in Western Europe seeking special military training. Eventually he was approached by the CIA and invited to participate in the special espionage training sessions taking place in the West German town of Kaufbeuren.

A friend of Nijolė’s, Julijonas Butenas, also a member of the resistance, introduced her to Lukša. At their first meeting Lukša called himself by a code name that tipped Nijole off not to ask any questions. They became friends and Nijolė showed Lukša around Paris a few times.

Nijolė Bražėnaitė had recently completed her degree in medicine when she met Juozas Lukša. She had managed to complete her studies, dodging the allied bombings of Germany, as she and her twin sister, Vida, traveled from one German city to the next, enrolling in universities and studying in them until the bombings would force the university to close.

Towards the end of the war Vida became ill with pulmonary tuberculosis. Nijolė practically carried Vida in her arms across Germany as it was being bombed by the Allies, eventually reaching Austria. By that time Vida was barely alive. It was winter. Nijolė climbed a mountain during a snowstorm to reach a sanatorium hoping the doctors would accept her sister. When she got there she was told every bed was occupied. She dropped to her knees and begged the head doctor to take Vida in. He did and Vida eventually recovered. Vida married and emigrated with her new husband to Australia. Meanwhile, in 1948 Nijolė traveled to Paris, where she found work as a lab assistant.

The damp Parisian autumn of 1948 and the meager living conditions for war refugees contributed to Nijolė contracting tuberculosis. Nijolė spent 1948 through 1950 in French hospitals and sanatoriums convalescing. Her life was often in danger. Wartime conditions left the French hospitals undersupplied and understaffed. Nijolė would lie for months on blood-caked sheets. Only when friends took her bed linens home and washed them did she get any relief from the grime.

During that time Lukša remained in Paris illegally, living in hiding in an ever-changing series of garrets and rooming houses, registering under aliases. He spent his days alternately writing his memoir or looking for a means to return to the invisible war being fought in Lithuania. During his time in Paris Lukša had to dodge the NKVD and Lithuanian displaced persons who might recognize him. Because he was in hiding, Lukša could visit Nijolė in the hospital very rarely. That is how their correspondence began.

From 1948 through 1950 Juozas and Nijolė wrote to each other almost every day. Juozas’s letters kept Nijolė going during her long illness and Nijolė’s letters helped Juozas Lukša cope with his feelings of desperation and loss. Both had lost brothers in the war and both had lost their parents. Both had seen their homes destroyed by Soviet occupying forces and both longed to one day return to their country and to the peaceful life they’d known before the war. Both also strongly believed in the necessity of fighting for Lithuania’s freedom.

In 1950 a friend who’d been released from the sanatorium left Nijolė a fish bowl with three gold fish. Lukša admired the gold fish on one of his rare visits. Afterwards, the couple wrote a few lines about the gold fish in each of their letters, playfully referring to the gold fish as their “children.” They gave them names, discussed their educations and upbringing. Soon, they both began writing about how it seemed inevitable that they must marry. They planned their wedding, knowing that Lukša was resolved to return to Soviet-occupied Lithuania to carry out his assigned mission, knowing that he might never return. Nijolė supported him in his decision. It never even occurred to her to ask him to stay; in fact, had she been able, she would have volunteered to fight herself. Nijolė wrote to Juozas in one of her letters, “I envy your opportunity to fight for our country.”

Juozas Lukša and Nijolė Bražėnaitė were married July 23, 1950. They lived together as a married couple for only one week. After their honeymoon in the mountains of Treifelberg near Tübingen, Germany, Lukša returned to the CIA training camp in Kaufbeuren. That summer the Korean War began. The Cold War was escalating and the men receiving training at the camp at Kaufbeuren would have to put their personal lives on hold. Lukša completed his training and shortly afterward returned to the Invisible War in Lithuania.

*            *            *

Eleonora and Nijolė waited 55 years to meet and it might never have happened if not for a chance conversation in a café in Kernavė, Lithuania in 2006. I was in Lithuania working on a literary translation fellowship and was invited by friends to participate in a hike through the countryside with a group of ethnographers and archeologists. We stopped for lunch in a café. A man named Rimas, who was seated at my table began telling me about how a year ago he and his three teenage sons had traveled across Lithuania on bicycles searching for “bunkers.”

A bunker, or “bunkeris” in Lithuanian, derived from the German World War II term “bunker,” means a secret hiding place for the underground resistance. A bunker can be a dug-out in the forest, as was usually the case, or it could be an attic or a root cellar in someone’s house. It could also be a barn, an empty well, an abandoned building or any other hidden place.

Rimas told me he’d met a woman named Eleonora Labanauskienė in southern Lithuania in the village of Alendarne who had told him that November 1950 through May 1951 she had hidden two leaders of the resistance, Juozas Lukša and Alfonsas Ramanauskas-Vanagas, in a bunker under the floorboards of her home.

That day in Kernave I understood immediately that any information provided by Eleonora Labanauskiene regarding the return of Juozas Lukša would be of extreme interest not only to researchers, but also to his widow, Nijolė Bražėnaitė-Lukšienė-Paronetto, a close family friend. Sitting that day at the long wooden table in the café in Kernavė under recast copper coats of arms and racks of moose antlers, it was clear to both me and to Rimas that we had to bring Eleonora and Nijolė together, that these two women would have something to share with each other. Both had aided him as he fought a David and Goliath battle against Soviet Internal Troops.

Our first try to connect the two women was through a laptop. However, that attempt failed. Neither would even try. Eleonora was nearly deaf and Nijolė has macular degeneration with very limited eye sight. But more importantly, both women were of the generation where no technology could replace the bond of human contact. They would not compromise. They had to meet and speak to each other face to face.

When I returned to the United States in June, 2006, I went to visit Nijolė. She was determined to go to Lithuania to meet Eleonora. Sept. 5, 2006 marked the fifty-fifth anniversary of the death of Juozas Lukša. Nijolė wanted to travel to Lithuania to participate in a series of war memorials that would be held that week to commemorate her first husband’s death. She also planned to travel to the backwaters of Lithuania to the tiny brick farm house where Lukša had hidden under the floorboards while Soviet Interior Forces and local home-grown Soviet militia informants scoured the countryside searching for him.

The only problem was that someone had to take her and that someone was me. It was my fate my Lithuanian friends told me.  Lithuanians are firm believers in fate — a type of fate believed to be woven at birth and to have mystical and logic-defying properties.

And so, I found myself on a plane seated beside my eighty-two year old travel companion, taking a transatlantic flight into a journey of the heart.

No map could lead us to Eleonora. No stranger could get us inside her door. But Rimas knew the way to reach Eleonora. We drove out of the city of Vilnius, leaving behind that oasis of East European post-modernity and descended into a maze of unmarked dirt roads that Rimas knew like the back of his hand. We drove through kilometers of fields that a decade ago had been farmed but now lay fallow. We drove past abandoned villages where almost every resident had packed up and left for Ireland or the United Kingdom, searching for work. We drove past cows tethered to wooden stakes in the ground. We drove past elderly farmers bringing their goods to the market grounds in rough wooden carts hitched to work-worn horses. We were on a journey of the heart.

*          *            *

Eleonora’s husband, Vincas Labanauskas, had a brother who was friends with a partisan who went by the code name Lakštingala (Nightingale). Lakštingala and the Dzūkija Dainava District Partisan Commander Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas (Hawk) approached Vincas Labanauskas in 1950 and asked him if he would agree to allow the local Dzukija Dainava District partisans to build a bunker in his home. Ramanauskas-Vanagas was one of the resistance’s most brilliant strategists and most colorful personages. He was an American-born school teacher who left the classroom to fight in the forest, bringing along with him almost his entire high school class. Vanagas was given the code name “hawk” because he’d trained a large black hawk to perch on his shoulder.

Vincas Labanauskas had not owned a lot of land during the period of independence. Ramanauskas-Vanagas reasoned that being a small farmer made him a “proletariat” in the eyes of the Bolsheviks, assuming his loyalty. Vanagas advised Labanauskas to accept the position of Director of the local collective farm. Then, Labanauskas would be less likely to be suspected of harboring “bandits.”

Eleonora and Vincas agreed to allow the partisans to dig the bunker underneath their bedroom. They were both patriots and both believed in a free and independent Lithuania. They felt duty-bound to do what they could to aid the resistance.

It took two nights for three partisans — Lakštingala, Vanagas, and Tauras to dig the bunker. They constructed an underground chamber two meters by two meters wide. The bunker was accessible through a trap door built into the wooden floorboards of the couple’s bedroom. The trapdoor was covered with a rug and a bed on top of the rug. The bunker contained two wooden benches, a wooden cot, and a shelf built into the wall. The shelf held a typewriter, grenades, weapons, and ammunition. Eleonora gave the partisans a blanket and a pillow for the bunker.

Ramanauskas-Vanagas gave Eleonora a code name — Varna (Crow). He typed up a Certificate of Loyalty and instructed her to hold onto it until Lithuania was independent. He also gave her a gun, a dešimtukas, and taught her how to load it, clean it, and shoot it. He instructed her to shoot herself in the left temple if Soviet Interior Forces surrounded the house. Vanagas impressed upon Eleonora that she should not allow them to take her alive. Eleonora kept the pistol in a glass canning jug buried in her flower garden.

Ramanauskas-Vanagas asked Eleonora if she agreed to allow a bomb the size of a bowling ball into her home. If the bunker were surrounded by Soviet Interior Forces, the charge would be detonated, exploding the house and killing all its occupants. Eleonora agreed. She understood that she was sacrificing not only her own life and her husband’s life, but the lives of her three small daughters: Vanda (9), Janina (7), and Natalia (5).

Eleonora taught her three daughters to never say a word in school about the “uncles” who visited their home and who disappeared under the floorboards. The girls were good as gold. They kept their parents’ secret.

Eleonora cooked, cleaned, and provided fresh laundry for the partisans in the bunker. “Vanagas used to say that I would kill him with my cleanliness,” Eleonora said, “Because I was a stickler. I made sure every man in the bunker had fresh undergarments every other day.”

One day Ramanauskas-Vanagas told Eleonora he was bringing a man from abroad to live in the bunker. When this man arrived, he introduced himself simply as “Mikas” (Juozas Lukša).

“He didn’t tell me anything about where he was from, not even his real name,” Eleonora recalls. “He was very disciplined and strict, but at the same time very warm and sincere.”

Eleonora also recalls that Mikas gave her a watch, but instructed her “not to wear it.”

Mikas quickly melded into the daily rhythms of the Labanauskas household. He helped Eleonora peel potatoes and cook. He would read the girls bedtime stories at night or keep them entertained by playing with them during the day. Meanwhile, he dutifully carried out the mission assigned to him by the American CIA.

Together with Ramanauskas-Vanagas, Lukša drafted a set of espionage instructions to be carried out by the Dainava District partisans. Dated November 25, 1950, this document begins with the following statement:

In the interest of an independent Lithuania and in the interest of the current international community, the Lithuanian underground is hereby asked to quickly provide answers to the following questions, pertaining to all spheres of life in Soviet Lithuania. The underground is asked to exert all of their efforts collecting the following information and to send it to the leadership.

The six-page typewritten document is broken into six sections: Politics, Economics, Administration, Transportation, Education and Religion, and Military. The Political Section concerns itself with finding the number and proportion of Communist Russians sent to infiltrate Soviet Lithuanian government, education, and factories and also with the names and numbers of Lithuanians exiled to Siberia and their fate. The Military Section covers all aspects of the Soviet Military on Lithuanian soil.  Many of the instructions are quite detailed: “How much leeway does the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic have to draft laws” or “How many Lithuanians are recruited into the Soviet Army? Where are they housed? How are they armed?” or “Since Soviet Interior Forces control the coastline and ports, how carefully do they control fishing boats?”

In 1953, two years after Lukša was lured out of hiding and walked to his death along the edge of a Lithuanian forest in Pažeriai, his comrade, Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas, was captured and tortured in the bowels of the KGB prisons in Kaunas and in Vilnius. Allegedly the KGB traced a hundred dollar bill back to him on the black market. It was Lukša’s hundred dollar bill. He’d given it to Ramanauskas-Vanagas. When he returned to Lithuania, the CIA had provided Lukša with 2,000 US dollars in crisp new hundred dollar bills. One of those bills came back to betray Ramanauskas-Vanagas in the end.

“Vanagas’s misfortune,” said Juozas Luksa’s brother, Antanas Lukša, “was that he didn’t have enough time to kill himself before they took him.”

Under intense torture, Ramanauskas-Vanagas revealed that he and Juozas Lukša had hidden in a bunker in the Labanauskas home. Vincas Labanauskas was arrested March 4, 1953, on the Feast Day of Saint Casimir. He was tortured, interrogated, and exiled to hard labor in Siberia for fifteen years. Eleonora was arrested March 14, 1953. She was tortured and interrogated in the KGB prison in Vilnius from March 14, 1953 to August 10, 1953.

“They’d put a noose around my neck and yank it,” Eleonora told us.

She was also subjected to the water cell where, badly beaten and sleep-deprived, prisoners were made to stand on a small metal disk submerged in cold water. When sleep overcame them, they’d slip and fall into the cold rat-infested water.

One of the most cruel tortures that Eleonora recalls was when the interrogator would shove her into a toilet stall the size of a telephone booth and then let fifty white rats loose out of a cage into the stall. The interrogator would lock the door shut, leaving Eleonora for hours crammed inside the small space covered by gnawing hungry rats.

Eleonora refused to collaborate and at one point was beaten so badly on her backside, that for a week she had to crawl around on her hands and knees. Then she got the idea to play-act that she was schizophrenic.  As a schizophrenic she was of no use as an informant.

“The entire time they tortured me,” Eleonora said, “all I could think about was my family, about protecting my family, so they wouldn’t be destroyed.”

At her trial, Eleonora was offered a lawyer to represent her, for a fee. She refused. “I have a tongue, I can speak for myself,” she said.

Eleonora Labanauskienė was sentenced to five years in Siberia, but in the end she was released home to her children because they were minors and there was no one who could care for them. When Eleonora returned home she found that all of her possessions and all of her furniture, including the bed they all slept in, had been confiscated by the local communists. She was told she would have to buy back her possessions, piece by piece. Eleonora borrowed money from her brother and began rebuilding her life, although she was constantly harassed by the local communist authorities. None of Eleonora’s daughters were allowed by Communist authorities to advance their education beyond high school. The punishments for harboring “bandits” were far reaching and intergenerational under the Soviet system.

I asked Eleonora if she had to make the choice again, knowing what she knew now, would she work for the resistance. Without hesitating, Eleonora nodded and said firmly, “Yes.”

*          *            *

Eleonora took Nijolė by the arm and the two women walked inside the house. The rest of us followed. Eleonora’s daughter, Vanda, rushed out of the kitchen, saying “Please, come, sit down at the table.”

Vanda led us through the tiny front sitting room and into a small dining room. The walls were plaster and covered with pale green wallpaper. The wooden floorboards were covered with linoleum tiles. A tall row of dark wooden wardrobes separated the dining room from Eleonora’s tiny bedroom. A picture of Holy Mary hung on one of the walls above the table. The single window in the room was covered with a curtain knit in intricate patterns from white linen yarn.

“Now you must sit and eat,” Vanda said.

We all took our places around the table. Nijolė sat beside Eleonora.  The table was covered with a white table cloth. In the Lithuanian tradition a white table cloth is used to cover the table at Christmas Eve dinner or for important guests. There were so many platters of different varieties of meats, salads, breads, compotes, and baked goods that I could barely find a place to set down the bottle of cognac I’d brought and the large box of chocolates.

“We celebrated Christmas Eve and Easter together with Mikas and Vanagas, here at this table,” Eleonora said, patting the table like an old friend. “Times were hard then. It wasn’t like now where you can buy everything in the store. We had to raise our own animals and all of our food. It was hard work.”

Vanda picked up a plate of herring, cooked in a sauce of onions and peppers, and offered it to Nijole. Janina picked up a bowl of beet salad and began heaping generous portions into everyone’s plates.

Eleonora took Nijolė’s hand in hers and said, “We’d sit here in this room, Mikas and I, and we’d face each other and talk from the depths of our souls.”  Eleonora paused and then said, “And I’ll tell you what he said, ‘Oh Eleonora, how sorry I am that I left my young wife, Nijolė, behind. But what could I do? It was my mission. I had to carry out my mission. He did not know if he’d ever see you again.”

Nijolė gazed back at Eleonora and said, “In one of his letters he wrote to me, ‘Nijolė you must know that you have competition and that competition is my first love and my first wife and her name is Lithuania.’ That was competition I could never overcome.  I knew from the beginning that he would go back and fight. That it was his duty. And I accepted it.”

*          *            *

After he was air-dropped into Lithuania, Lukša became one of the most wanted men on the Kremlin’s list of spies and saboteurs. The NKVD quickly learned of Lukša’s return and initiated a series of large-scale manhunts, combing the forests and raiding farmsteads. There are several documented instances in which men were shot on the spot because of their physical resemblance to Lukša — a handsome man with thick dark brown curly hair, large blue eyes, a ready smile, and an athletic build.

Orders were to hunt down Lukša and to take him alive. In the final stages of the manhunts some of the most prominent Soviet security senior officials, such as Leonid Ejtingon and Lavrenty Beria, were involved in the search for Lukša.

According to KGB archives, between January 11, 1951 and Lukša’s death in an ambush September 5, 1951, roughly 50 manhunts were initiated and carried out by Soviet Security forces. On average 1,041 troops participated in each manhunt. On one occasion a manhunt that took place on May 8, 1951 involved 2316 troops. But, the agreed radio call “5-5-5” in the event of finding Lukša was never broadcast. At the time Lukša was hiding in the bunker under the floorboards of Vincas and Eleonora Labanauskas’s home.

In the process of these manhunts 26 partisans were apprehended and killed and 10 were arrested. One Soviet Security lieutenant was killed. Although Lukša himself eluded Soviet Security forces and the NKVD for eleven months, bunkers were raided and necessary supplies and documents were confiscated. The archives provide an impressive list of confiscated items: two typewriters, two radios, documents, printing supplies, two parachutes, a camera, a generator, boots, pants, topographical maps, anti-Soviet pamphlets, one submachine gun, sleeping bags, a compass, ammunition, gloves, Lukša’s watch, newspapers, chocolate, 3,600 rubles, 2,000 złotys, a box containing 285 bullets, several pistols, a grenade.

*          *            *

Before he departed for Lithuania in 1950, Juozas Lukša instructed Nijolė to burn the letters he’d written her. She couldn’t bring herself to do it. She hid them instead.

I don’t think any woman could resist a man who wrote like Lukša or forget him even half a century later:

The warmth that emanates from your letters bewitches me. I’d like it if every time you were overcome with loneliness, with longing for me, I could be with you and give you happiness, a happiness that you’ve never before known. But, what  obstacles get in our way! The God of fate is cruel. Carefully, with the patience and lovingness of an ant, you build yourself a palace in the future and He comes and knocks it all down with one sweep of his hand, leaving you only with pain and longing and with the mirage of happiness.

May 10, 1949

When Lithuania regained its independence in 1991 an editor coaxed the letters out of Nijolė.  It was difficult for her to make the letters public, but in the end she did, for the sake of history. They were published in Lithuania as a collection called Letters to my Loved One (Laiškai Mylimosioms). The publication of the letters led to Nijolė making more and more public appearances in which she was asked to talk about Lukša and their time together in Paris.

Juozas Lukša told Nijolė that he too would burn the letters she’d written him. Only, he too couldn’t bring himself to do it. Instead, before boarding the plane that would airdrop him back into Lithuania, he tucked the letters into a brown envelope and with a crayon wrote across the front of the envelope: Noli tangere circulos meos.

Those were Archimedes’ last words before he was killed by an invading Roman soldier: Do not disturb my circles. The legend goes that Archimedes was sketching circles in the sand, too busy with his calculations to notice that the enemy had entered the city. Lukša handed the letters and a circumference to a CIA secretary and instructed her to return them to Nijolė.

Fifty six years later Nijolė entrusted those letters to me.

The letters reveal that the young couple’s relationship had been built on a longing for their native country and also on an understanding that Lukša would return to Lithuania to continue fighting in the resistance and that Nijolė would wait for him. In a later dated February 19, 1949 Nijolė wrote:

I believe you know the thoughts I send after you, after your visits, the thought that I so want, together with you, to kiss the land we both haven’t seen for such a long time. You’d come to me tonight thinking about how we won’t  see each other again and we’d both talk about everything, but not about that which is most holy and most painful to us. Maybe it’s better that way? After all, nothing is certain either for you or for me. Only it hurts me to think that you thought that I’d placed our happiness above the fight for freedom. No, Juozas, I’d never dare to ask you to change your position, and I know that you’d never change it. And for that I love you even more. I don’t think I’d change anything either if I had the fortune of being in your position.

Lukša replied to Nijolė’s letter with the humor that so many people later remembered him for: “I see that you are a woman in the style of the Greek antiquity, ‘Either come home with a sword, or don’t come home at all.’” But then in a more serious tone, Lukša wrote in the same letter, “Knowing you, the way I do, makes me proud, and gives me the strength I need to face critical situations.”

And yet there were moments when Lukša allowed himself to dream. On March 3, 1949 Lukša wrote, “Oh, wouldn’t it be wonderful if after everything were over — everything that is yet to pass — that we could drink in all our happiness.”

A few days later, on March 8, 1949, Lukša wrote:

You must agree that happiness doesn’t simply hang around at any one time or any one place, but that it is found only very rarely and under the most trying circumstances — that it’s hidden and only rarely shows itself. Maybe that’s why for us earthly creatures happiness is so dear, because it occurs so seldom and because it takes so much effort to attain it.

Sometimes Lukša railed against Fate. On June 6, 1949 Lukša wrote:

Often, Nijolė, when I am drowning in my longing for you, I cannot understand why Fate has been so cruel to us. First it bound our spirits, and then it separated us just when our days are numbered. Maybe that is all right, but I worry that rather than make us stronger, the result will be that it will destroy us morally. Fate will make us despair of the existence of happiness at all.

Despite his love for Nijolė, Lukša placed his commitment to the resistance above his personal life. In a letter written in August, 1950, just a month after their wedding, Lukša wrote to Nijolė:

…And, after all, the two of us have given up the insistence of “me”

and have given ourselves up to the demands of my “first wife.” I know, Nijolė, that from now on I won’t be fighting just for my own honor, but for our honor, and that you will be there with me in your prayers. I believe that the feelings we share for each other will not disappoint us and one day we will be together again in that joy we dream so much of and in which we both live.

On June 10, 1950, Nijolė had written to Lukša:

I don’t know how to express to you how I feel now that our dreams are coming true. I know that all of it will be very different from how things usually are in life. But all the same, every minute that we are physically separated will make our spiritual bond only stronger, and together we will sacrifice everything for your (and for my) first love.

Perhaps Nijolė’s understanding of Juozas’s mission stemmed from her own experiences as a participant in the resistance to the Nazi occupation of Lithuania in 1941. As teenagers she and her twin sister printed anti-Nazi proclamations on a printing press hidden along with weapons in their family’s garden shed at their house in Kaunas. Nijolė’s younger brother, Mindaugas, was conscripted at the age of eighteen into the German Luftwaffe. He used his German uniform to smuggle Jewish children out of the Kaunas ghetto and deliver them to his mother, Konstancija Bražėnienė, who would hide them in her home, feed and clothe them, and raise them as her own until they could be smuggled safely out of the country.

For her efforts Konstancija Bražėnienė was exiled by the Soviets to ten years hard labor in Siberia. In the late forties and early fifties the Soviets would exile to Siberia people who had resisted the Nazis on the principal that if they had resisted one regime they could not be trusted not to resist another.

After Lukša returned to Lithuania in October, 1950, Nijolė’s friend Julijonas Butenas handed Nijole Lukša’s final letter to her, written that August.

A little more than 20 days separates me from the memories of the happiness we shared in Treifelberg. Often, when I wrench myself out of my “first wife’s” grip, I drown in memories of us. I dream of you, Dear One. I feel so happy that it doesn’t seem possible that you could find anyone who could compete with my happiness. It is sad that these days, like you, I must rely on satisfying myself with the memory of that happiness I’d so dreamed of, so longed for.

At the same time, they were both young and felt invincible. “Somehow, we believed everything would work out,” Nijolė recalls. “We believed Juozas would complete his mission and return safely.”

*          *            *

When Lukša and his team landed, they encountered their first setback. They’d lost one of the containers, holding warm clothing, rain gear, part of the radio transmitter, medicine, ammunition, food, money, and anti-Soviet literature. Lukša decided not to take the time to search for the container because he reasoned that they did not have much time before the Soviet Interior Forces would arrive. He was certain that they would have noticed that an unidentified plane had entered their airspace. They searched for the container half an hour and then moved on, taking turns carrying the heavy radio transmitter equipment on their backs.

The second obstacle they experienced was that they had been dropped five days walk from their area of operation, the Tauras District. The night had been rainy and foggy and the pilot could not turn on his navigational equipment because it would have been detected on the Soviets’ radars. He dropped Lukša and the radio men at the first opportune spot, which turned out to be the Žemaityja region — unfamiliar territory.

They buried their parachutes and continued onwards to their meeting place. The Tyrelis Forest, where they’d been dropped, was mostly swamp, and they were soon thoroughly drenched. It had been raining when they were dropped in Lithuania and it continued to rain heavily during the entire trek. They stopped at a farm in a village and went to sleep in the hay barn. The farmer’s wife discovered them when she went out to the barn. She invited them indoors. She quickly covered all the windows and rushed to prepare a meal. From her reaction, the paratroopers knew she was accustomed to hiding partisans on her farm. After they ate, they set out towards the Nemunas River. They walked at night and hid in the forest during the day. They ate at farms along the way. Trumpys developed bad blisters from his new boots, so he had to make the trip on foot in his socks.

After three uneventful days’ journey, they reached the swollen Nemunas.

They found a row boat and rowed towards the opposite bank. They could see the lights of Jurbarkas on the opposite shore. A strong current caught the boat and carried them too far downstream. As they cut their way back through dense undergrowth, they lost one of their submachine guns. On the evening of October 10 they reached the Skirkiškis village where Lukša had some close friends, the Vaitkevičius family. The family was shocked to see that Lukša had returned from the West. They could not believe that he would chose to return to a certain death. They told him that all the partisans who had accompanied him on his trip to cross the border to the West were dead.

The KGB archives in Vilnius reveal that on Sept. 8, 1951, three days after Lukša’s death, during interrogation, Marcele Vaitkevičius said the following:

“In the fall of 1950 Skirmantas (one of Lukša’s code names) and two friends arrived. They were armed and were wearing sports clothing. Each of them had a small backpack. They said they’d returned from the West, where they had received training at an espionage school. A plane had brought them back and they’d been parachuted into Lithuania to conduct reconnaissance. They were dropped in the Klaipėda region. They came to us on foot. They hid their parachutes in the forest. After dinner Skirmantas gave me a watch and gave my husband 30 US dollars. He asked if we were in contact with the partisans. He said he wanted to meet up with them. The next day he asked us to bring him to Zavadskis. One kilometer away from Zavadskis’s farm I got out and walked. I asked him to come and fix a broken wheel on my cart. When Zavadskis came out into the yard alone, I told him that Skirmantas and his friends were waiting for him. Once they’d met, I returned home.

After this initial contact was made with partisan liaisons, Lukša and the remaining partisans in the Tauras District experienced set back after set back. Several former partisans had joined forces with the NKVD and had infiltrated partisan ranks, wearing authentic uniforms and carrying authentic weapons. Because of the deft work of these traitors, called smogikai, partisan ranks in the Tauras District were thinned considerably. Remarkably, Lukša managed to evade detection under those circumstances for eleven months.

Although Lukša managed to remain alive and operate undetected for nearly a year, the intelligence that he gathered now made him suspicious to the CIA. Through reconnaissance missions Lukša found that the Soviets were not mobilizing to invade the West. In fact, he found that the opposite was true—that the Soviet Union was fortifying its defenses against a perceived attack from the West. Lukša radioed this information to his CIA contacts in Germany. The CIA’s reaction was to suspect Lukša of counter-espionage and purposefully sending misleading information. He was dropped from the program and radio contact with him ceased. A second group of spies were parachuted into Lithuania to carry out the same mission. Lukša’s friend and comrade, Jonas Kukauskas, was sent on this mission.

By the early 50s, after six years of warfare, the armed resistance in Lithuania was falling apart. By 1951 the resistance’s numbers had dwindled considerably. Most of its members had either been killed, arrested and executed, or deported to Siberia. The civilian populace that had provided practical and logistical support had also been mostly deported to Siberia or rounded up onto collective farms and terrorized into submission. As is typical of any prolonged war, order began to fall apart among the ranks. Occasionally, raids on innocent villagers and abuses took place, causing the resistance to lose civilian support and credibility.

Lukša began to plead the case for a civil resistance, but no one in Lithuania at the time was ready to lead it. He argued that small pockets of the resistance embedded within civilian life could have more of an effect undermining the Soviet system from within. Once it became clear that Lukša had done all he could, he resolved to return to Nijolė and to the West.

In 1951 one of Lukša’s comrades, a partisan who went by the code name, Lakštingala (Nightingale), had a friend who had been fighting at the Eastern front for the Russians as a reconnaissance pilot. After the war he had returned home to Lithuania. Lukša talked to Lakštingala about possible alternatives for traveling to the West and Lakštingala talked to his friend about using his Antonov-2 (the so called Kukuruznik, or crop duster) to escape across the Baltic Sea to Gotland, Sweden. At the time Sweden was no longer returning refugees. They would have flown at night, possibly in bad weather. The men made an agreement and everything was settled. The only remaining problem was to procure fuel. In the meantime, Lukša was invited to the secret meeting that would end his life.

On the night of September 5, 1951 Lukša was lured out of hiding by his fellow resistance fighter and close friend, Jonas Kukauskas. Kukauskas had lived together with Lukša in Paris and had trained together with him at the CIA camp in Kaufbeuren. Previous to their training with the CIA, they also both trained with French intelligence and would swim together in the River Seine during breaks in their training routine. Kukauskas, nicknamed “Dzikis,” was mentioned often and with great affection in Nijolė and Lukša’s letters. Almost every letter from Nijolė ended with the line, “Pass on my regards to Dzikis…”

Kukauskas had been parachuted back into Lithuania when the second air-drop was made. Kukauskas and his comrade, another paratrooper who had arrived with him, Julijonas Butenas, were holed up in a bunker when they were ambushed. Butenas was wounded in a firefight with Soviet Internal Troops as they tried to exit the bunker. Butenas and Kukauskas returned to the bunker and Butenas reached for a grenade to commit suicide together with Kukauskas, standard procedure for partisans surrounded in an ambush. Kukauskas, however, surprised Butenas by shooting him in the back and killing him. Kukauskas then climbed out of the bunker and surrendered to Nachman Dushansky, the Soviet Security Officer leading the operation. Dushansky used Kukauskas to lure Lukša into a rendezvous where they intended to take him alive. Kukauskas sent a series of encoded messages to Lukša with the intention of arranging a secret meeting. Over the course of several days Lukša and Kukauskas corresponded through a liaison, sending encoded messages that tested each other’s intentions. Because Kukauskas had lived together with Lukša in Paris, he was able to answer each of Lukša’s questions correctly, ensuring his identity. Although Lukša confided to others before the fated meeting that he had doubts about Kukauskas’s loyalty, he decided to go to the meeting because the resistance was in desperate need of supplies and a radio transmitter to contact the West.

Kukauskas instructed Lukša to meet him at a secret location near the village of Pabartupis.  Meanwhile, Soviet security forces set up an extensive ambush and lay in waiting for Lukša’s arrival. Apparently, Kukauskas hesitated and fumbled the answer when Lukša asked the password. Lukša realized instantly he’d been lured into a trap and reached for his gun. A soldier hiding in the bushes close by panicked and shot at Lukša, although orders had been to take him alive. Lukša returned fire, but he was outnumbered. Lukša was killed. Some eye witnesses claim that Lukša, realizing he was surrounded, shot himself in the head to avoid being taken alive. How Lukša died remains unclear because soon after the ambush his body disappeared and was never recovered. Recently, a former smogikas who had participated in the operation to capture Lukša came forward with information regarding the place where his body was secretly buried and attempts have been made to locate his remains. Unfortunately those attempts thus far have failed.

*            *            *

Nijolė remained alone in Europe for another six years, working for the Supreme Committee for the Liberation of Lithuania. She chose not to board one of the ships filled with war refuges bound for America. She waited in Europe for news of her husband. But news never came.

In 1956 congressman Charles Kerrsten, chairman of the Select Committee on Communist Aggression, traveled to Europe to interview refugees from Eastern Europe on the atrocities committed under the Soviets. Because Nijolė was fluent in several European languages, she was asked by Kerrsten to accompany him as a translator on his fact-finding mission. While visiting refugee camps in Germany, Kerrsten pieced together the story of Lukša’s death. He broke the news to Nijolė and urged her to move on with her life. With the help of Kerrsten’s family, Nijolė emigrated to America.

In America Nijolė was able to put her medical diploma to use and passed the necessary certification to become a pathologist. She became the department head of the pathology department at Saint Joseph’s Medical Center in New York. She remarried, marrying a colleague, the medical doctor Fiorenzo Paronetto. They had two daughters and settled in New York.

Juozas Lukša had known that going back to fight in the invisible war in Lithuania could end his life. In his final letter to Nijolė, written in August 1950, he wrote “If it should happen that fate dictates that I be physically destroyed, then you, my Nijole, make me happy, wherever I am, by creating a happy life for yourself once again.” Because of these words, Nijole felt that Juozas had given her his blessing to remarry.

*            *            *

Nijolė knew that Juozas could not have lived with himself if he had not returned to his comrades and to his beloved nation. In public appearances Nijolė often quotes this passage from a letter written by Juozas dated February 16, 1949, Lithuania’s prewar Independence Day:

I search and search and cannot find someone to blame nor can I find an answer as to why I am here today and not there where I ought to be. A year has gone by and the not-knowing eats away at my conscience. It’s been a year since my footsteps led me away from the blood-soaked soil of my homeland. It’s been a year since I’ve watched the crucifixion of my beloved country. It’s been a year since I’ve heard my people’s wails of pain. It’s been a year and so many of my friends have passed into death. It’s been a year since I’ve fought together with my fellow Lithuanians in a battle of life and death. I think of all the graves of the past five years, I think of the long lines of my friends marked for death, and I want to live, but at the same time I hunger to see my bones beside the bones of my crucified friends.

*          *            *

“Times were horrible,” Eleonora said, her face growing dark, “I remember the heaps of corpses the Soviet Internal Troops would bring out of the forests after a battle. They’d dump them in the market square and make everyone walk past and look. If you reacted, they’d take you in for questioning. And the worst was that some of our own village men would join the NKVD and turn on us.”

“I don’t understand it,” Nijole said, shaking her head, “it seems that the schools were good when we were growing up in independent Lithuania. People were civil. There was law and order. Where did this barbarism come from?”

“War,” Eleonora said and gave a firm nod, “war will do it.”

“To the Russians, they were terrorists, you know,” Rimas said.

“It all depended on what side you were on,” Nijolė said, “to the Russians he was a terrorist. To us he was a hero.”

“When I was here in the spring,” I said to Eleonora, “you told me that Juozas would say you looked like Nijolė. So tell me now, does she look like you?”

Eleonora squeezed Nijolė’s hand and beamed. She didn’t answer. For me, the answer was obvious. The two women looked like sisters. Both were around the same height, had gray wavy hair that had once been a dark blond, and determined steel blue eyes.  Both also had high cheekbones and angular faces, but those features were typical for Lithuanians. Lithuania is a tiny country with a small gene pool, so there was a strong likelihood that these two women might resemble each other.

Yet Nijolė and Eleonora’s resemblance went beyond the physical; their resemblance was something of the spirit.  Both possessed the resolve and determination it took to stand up to a totalitarian regime and to pay the price — Nijolė by losing her husband after only a week of marriage, Eleonora by losing her husband to 15 years of hard labor in Siberia and by being tortured herself for six months. And both women had the strength of character to come out of the experience just as determined as when they first made the decision to knowingly risk their lives for freedom, for democracy, and for their nation’s independence.

“Mikas believed we would be independent again,” Eleonora said, “he would say, ‘the Russians won’t last long.’”

“I remember how Lukša and Vanagas used to teach us how to write our letters,” Vanda said, bustling in from the kitchen with another steaming platter of pork chops. “Vanagas would give each of us sisters a stick of chalk and we’d go outside and he’d write the letters across the saw horse and we’d copy them.”

“Ah, and do you remember,” Eleonora’s other daughter, Janina, said, “how Mikas would wrap me in a bolt of Mother’s woven fabric and put me up high on top of the shelf. Then he’d tell you to go and find me.”

“And of course I never could because it would never occur to me to look for you wrapped in a bolt of fabric and up high on the shelf!” Vanda laughed.

Only years later, when the girls were grown women, did Eleonora explain to them that the man who’d wrapped them in bolts of fabric and who told them bedtime stories was the legendary leader of the resistance, Juozas Lukša.

“One day I was walking to the store when I saw a column of military trucks heading towards our farm,” Eleonora said. “A cold chill went through me, but I just kept walking calmly. I went to the store, bought what I needed, and went back home. The NKVD had surrounded our house and was doing a raid. They had four machine guns set up at all four corners of the house. Eighteen of them decided to spend the night in our house, to keep watch.”

The memory made Eleonora’s blood pressure rise. Her cheeks grew red and she fanned her face. Vanda put her hands on Eleonora’s shoulders and offered to take her to bed, but Eleonora shook her away. Determined to tell her story, Eleonora continued:

“Lucky for us, they were all hiding down in the bunker. Night came. Vanagas fell asleep down there in the bunker and he started to snore. He was snoring so loud the NKVD officer burst into our bedroom and began poking around. My husband understood immediately what was going on, so he started to snore in a loud, obnoxious manner. The NKVD officer turned around and walked out. The next day they left. That was a close call.”

This story leads Eleonora to another story. The memories come back to her in a rush.

“We’d be peeling potatoes in the kitchen, Mikas and I,” Eleonora said, “and he’d pick up the edge of the curtain and curse in Russian and say, ‘are those the Russians coming?’  And then he’d laugh when he saw my reaction.”

“Could we see the bunker?” Rimas asked, standing up.

Eleonora led us outside, through the flower garden, and around to the side of the house.

“It’s all different now,” Vanda said, walking behind us, “after it was all over, we turned the bunker into a root cellar.”

We opened the door to the bunker. The door was built years later, when Vincas Labanauskas returned from prison camp and busied himself working on the house. A set of narrow wooden steps lead down to a dark closed space. The women have rows of canning jars set on the shelf that once held Vanagas’s typewriter and the mens’ guns, grenades, and ammunition.

“This is where they had to live, the three of them, Lukša, Vanagas, and his wife, Birute” Eleonora said. “They spent many long hours down here. It would be humid and then it would be cold, but that was how they lived.

Nijolė stood beside Eleonora and took her hand in hers. They peered down at the dark, dank hole in the ground where Nijolė’s husband had lain in hiding, through all sorts of weather, for many long hours, while Soviet Interior Forces scoured the countryside looking for him.

“You had heartache,” Eleonora said to Nijolė, staring down into the dark, “but we lived through hell.”

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. This essay is from her translation of “Forest Brothers” which can be found here.

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