Manėm, kad greit grįšim: 18 pokalbių apie pasitraukimą į Vakarus, 1940–1944 (We Thought That We Could Come Back Soon: 18 Conversations about the Flight to the West in 1940–1944) by Laima Petrauskaitė VanderStoep, Dalia Stakytė Anysienė, and Dalia Cidzikaitė (review)

During World War II Lithuania experienced significant demographic changes, losing at least one-fifth of its prewar population. The Holocaust, mass migration, and Soviet deportations transformed the demographic profile of the country. During the time of Sąjudis (national revival) in the late 1980s, there was an avalanche of memoirs by Lithuanian deportees to Siberia. In addition, the government-supported Lietuvos Gyventojų Genocido ir Rezistencijos Tyrimo Centras (Genocide and Resistance Research Center of Lithuania) published many scholarly works on the deportations that were carried out under Stalin. In the late 1990s and early twenty-first century, there was an increased scholarly and popular interest in the Holocaust. Interestingly, the experiences of displacement from Lithuania to the West in 1940-47 have not received the same amount of attention. Although the exact number of people who left Lithuania for the West is unknown, some estimates suggest that it may have been as many as 500,000.

Manėm, kad greit grįšim, a collection of eighteen compelling stories about displacement from Lithuania at the end of World War II, brought the experiences of displacement to the forefront of the public debate in Lithuania in 2014 and 2015. This was the first collection of oral histories recording the stories of dipukai (displaced persons, or DPs) published in post-Soviet Lithuania. Currently the publisher is preparing an English version of the book, which will be available in early 2016.

The Lithuanian version of the book has been reviewed and discussed in many mass media outlets, and it has drawn crowds during presentations in cities with Lithuanian communities in the United States. Readers and listeners have been moved by the dramatic stories of individuals who had to leave their homes abruptly and who faced several hardships, as they had to find ways to survive in Western Europe (many of them went through DP camps) and adjust to life in North America. In addition, emigration is currently a politically charged issue in Lithuania, with its population having decreased to below three million during the last two years, and this collection of stories about the hardships of displacement has prompted the public to compare the migration that took place during 1940–44 with that of the twenty-first century.

Although the compilers of the stories are not professional historians, they have followed the expectations for a competent oral history project by paying attention to the language of those they interviewed and trying to maintain its authenticity, showing respect for the identities of the narrators and their stories and structuring their “conversations” around similar questions. (The compilers received assistance from professional historians.) These questions included specifics about the flight from Lithuania (as the Soviet military was approaching), including the dates and decision-making about when to flee, life in the DP camps, the decision to leave Western Europe, and adjusting to life in a new country (mostly the United States). The interviewees were also asked to reevaluate their decision to leave Lithuania in the light of what they knew when the interviews were conducted (1995–2013), and all of them confessed that they believed that they would return to Lithuania soon after the war.

This book is part of a larger project started by the Lithuanian community in the United States in 1995, “to record the memoirs of the generation of the displaced [Lithuanians] who left their homeland because of the approaching threat of the Communist occupation” (11). During the last two decades, sixty-five testimonies have been recorded, ranging in length from twenty-three minutes to five hours and thirty-eight...