Saving Ourselves

Displaced Persons sought to preserve their national identity. Once the Soviets swooped into the Baltic States, Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians took steps to save their cultures.

The DPs published booklets describing Lithuania's history, holiday customs, and family traditions:

Stuttgart, Germany, 1948. "Lithuania, My Dear Country," a short history of Lithuania. The text appears in three languages: English, Lithuanian, and German.

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Other leaflets preserved more recent history, describing the deportations of Lithuanians to Soviet prison camps:

Seligenstadt, Germany, 1948. The cover of "Pro Memoria," a leaflet that chronicles the memories of persons whose families were deported in 1941 to the Gulag camps. The text catalogs the numbers of Lithuanians shipped to the labor prisons. The "inventory" includes the numbers of the train (cattle) cars on which the deportees traveled:

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Groups also published pamphlets detailing the history and regional variations of folkdress:

Seligenstadt, Germany, 1947. "Folkdress Costumes for Lithuanian Women," a pamphlet that describes folkdresses, offeres patterns for sewing them, and creates sketches of local versions:

An inside page of the same pamphlet, illustrating the folkdress of a region appropriate for a girl, on the left, and a woman, on the right.

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Often the DPs would conduct a "paroda," or exhibit, highlighting some aspect of their culture. Women, for example, sewed miniature Lithuanian folkdresses representing the regional variation. They dressed dolls in the folkdress costumes and put the dolls on display.

Schweinfurt, Germany, 1946. My paternal Grandmother, Tatjana, on the far left, jokes around with two other women as they set up a "paroda" of dolls in folkdress.

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Every DP camp also had a wooden shrine with a traditional Lithuanian folk cross. The crosses resembled the ones Lithuanians erect in the countryside and at cemeteries.

Schweinfurt, Germany, about 1948. The traditional cross designates this area as a camp of Lithuanian DPs.