By Dalia Cidzikaitė
The new National Library of Lithuania exhibition, which opened on June 26, 2024, tells about the great flight that took place in the summer of 1944. At the end of WWII, as the German-Soviet war front approached from the east, the inhabitants of the Baltic States, Eastern and Central European countries moved en masse to the West. Nobody knew that they would not return.
The necessity of leaving home caught most Eastern Europeans little or completely unprepared. The rapid collapse of the German front in the east and the approaching Soviet army prevented any deliberation or planning. Since the flight was hasty, people did not have much time to think about what to take. Some took a photo album, others a prayer book or pictures of saints, and others a high school diploma or a dissertation. Still others grabbed books and textbooks, which were especially useful when schools and universities were later established in West Germany.
The first part of the exhibition “Stranded from the Native Land” features the pictures of saints taken from Lithuania, the passport of Adolfas Domaševičius (Damušis), his graduation diploma of from Vytautas Magnus University Faculty of Technology, the graduation diploma of Damušis’ future wife Jadvyga-Aleksandra Pšibilskytė (Damušienė) from the Klaipėda Pedagogical Institute, and the prayer book written by Adolfas Sabaliauskas “Šlovinkim Viešpatį,” published in 1928 [imprint: 1929] in Klaipėda.
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