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13. Kazys
- University of Nebraska Press
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95 chapter 13 Kazys in the final months of the German occupation Kazys Jakubėnas wrote a poem called “Paukšteliui” (For Little Bird) for Šimaitė. It begins: Will you fly to her, dear little bird, Beneath my beloved’s little window? Will you comfort her with your hymns And your sweet, resounding voice? Tell her that I’m alive and well, The terrible days are far behind (qtd. in A. Jakubėnas 18–19) The poem turned out to be fateful for Jakubėnas. In 1946 Soviet secret police searched his apartment, taking away two suitcases filled with manuscripts, and charged him with counter-revolutionary activity under article 58, section 1 of the Soviet criminal code. He spent the fall, winter, and spring of 1946 imprisoned in a Vilnius cell, half underground. Each night, agents interrogated him from nine in the evening until nine the next morning. During the day he was not allowed to lie down or to sleep. The questions were always the same: did he admit to being a Socialist Revolutionary? Time and again, Jakubėnas denied the charge, explaining that in 1946 it was impossible to belong 96 to a party that had ceased to exist in the 1920s (though we know from Šimaitė’s correspondence that she attended underground Socialist Revolutionary meetings while she was visiting the ghetto). The court set his trial for December 27, and his brother Alfonsas, a lawyer, began organizing his defense. The prosecution entered “For Little Bird” as evidence against him, and Petras Cvirka, writer and president of the Writers’ Union, testified that the poem could only be understood as anti-Soviet, citing Jakubėnas’s behavior at a union meeting: K. Jakubėnas bellowed that “the deported brothers must be repatriated.” It doesn’t take a genius to figure out which “brothers” he was talking about. There can be no doubt that K. Jakubėnas has demanded through his poetry that those “brothers,” who murdered farmers—our very own Soviet citizens —only yesterday, and who have now been apprehended by our security services, be repatriated. Of course, K. Jakubėnas wrote anti-Smetona1 poems, and during the German occupation wrote poetry denouncing the occupiers. He did this bravely and deserves credit for his anti-German work. But his anti-Soviet activity and behavior have negated any such credit due. (A. Jakubėnas 26) Little could be gained by those who testified on Jakubėnas’s behalf. People had been deported or executed on flimsier charges, and with more laughable evidence than poetry. Fear spread through the country, and even Jakubėnas’s closest friends refused to speak in his defense at trial. The only person willing to testify on the poet’s behalf was a professor who provided this written statement to the court: During the German occupation, from 1940 to 1944 without interruption, Citizen Ona Šimaitė worked at the Vilnius State University Library. As far as we know the Germans transported her to Germany in 1944. We do not know her subsequent fate. Prof. J. Baldžius. July 16 1946. (A. Jakubėnas 26) The text supported Jakubėnas’s assertion that the poem was about Šimaitė and not about the mass deportations to Siberia. Despite his brother’s best efforts, Jakubėnas was sentenced to Kazys [174.129.190.10] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 09:17 GMT) 97 five years of hard labor. Alfonsas filed an official protest, claiming that no wrongdoing had been established. Fearing his brother would be sent to the far north, Alfonsas collected his warm jacket and headed to the local jail. Kazys was no longer there, but was en route to the coal mines of Kazakhstan. Most of what we know about Kazys Jakubėnas’s trial, imprisonment , exile, and death come from accounts his brother published in newspapers during the Glasnost and Perestroika years. Alfonsas Jakubėnas reveals little about himself in these texts, but immediately striking is the man’s patience and persistence. He managed to tread the thin line that separated a private act from a criminal one under the Soviet justice system. An example of the line in her article that reads the secret police file as biography, Cristina Vatulescu explains that both the Romanian writer Steinhardt and the secret police seem to have shared the belief that the complex process of religious conversion that the writer underwent in prison was a personal matter and as such deserved no reprimand. However, sharing the contents of that...