Researching Post-War West and Post-Soviet East

Gintarė Venzlauskaitė at the National Library of Lithuania. Photo by Dalia Cidzikaitė

On March 6, a Ph.D. student from the University of Glasgow, Gintarė Venzlauskaitė, stopped at the National Library of Lithuania to talk about her research, entitled “From the post-war West to the post-Soviet East: manifestations of deportations, collective memory and experience of Lithuanian diaspora.” Recently, she came back from the United States where she interviewed 30 Lithuanian emigres, or so called DPs, people displaced at the end of World War II. Currently, Gintarė is finishing her Russian trip that has lasted for 2 months and stretched over 16 cities, towns and villages, making it 17,000 km-long. In Siberia, she has been collecting testimonies from Lithuanian survivors of massive deportations of the Stalin era.