Lithuanians in Displaced Persons (DP) Camps (1945-1951)

Description

When the Soviet army entered Lithuania in the summer of 1944, thousands of Lithuanians fled to the West in search of temporary refuge in an attempt to avoid repression and violence. Not all of them managed to reach the Displaced Persons (DP) camps in different countries (mainly Germany) and even those who arrived had a difficult road ahead of them.

This publication is a comprehensive account of our people who were displaced abroad by fate, of their daily life in the camps, of their attempts to survive, not to give in to despair, of their efforts to preserve their Lithuanian identity, to educate themselves, to improve themselves, to find the strength to start their lives anew, to spread the name of Lithuania across the globe, without forgetting the painful fate of their homeland.

The publication presents almost all the material about the displaced persons' camps and the life of the people in them that has been collected by the National Museum of Lithuania so far. Photographs, various personal documents, individual objects, the memoirs written by Mykolas Vansauskas, and the diary of Meilutė Šarkelytė, a schoolgirl who fled with her parents, provide a reconstruction and a coherent account of the path taken by war refugees in the quest for freedom and prosperity. Most of the material in the publication is being published for the first time.

The author of the publication is Irena Mikuličienė, historian at the National Museum of Lithuania.