Lithuania Quotes

How did I get here How did I end up in the arms of a boy I barely knew but knew I didn't want to lose I wondered what I would have thought of Andrius in Lithuania. Would I have liked him Would he have liked me

... Lithuanian nation must be saved, as it is the key to all the riddles - not only philology, but also in history - to solve the puzzle.

Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch. I am not Russian at all; I come from Lithuania, I am a real German. (Eliot's translation)

Tadas was sent to the principal today," announced Jonas at dinner. He wedged a huge piece of sausage into his small mouth. "Why?" I asked. "Because he talked about hell," sputtered Jonas, juice from the plump sausage dribbling down his chin. "Jonas, don't speak with your mouth full. Take smaller pieces," scolded Mother. "Sorry," said Jonas with his moth stuffed. "It's good." He finished chewing. I took a bite of sausage. It was warm and the skin was deliciously salty. "Tadas told one of the girls that hell is the worst place ever and there's no escape for all eternity." "Now why would Tadas be talking of hell?" asked Papa, reaching for the vegetables. "Because his father told him that if Stalin comes to Lithuania, we'll all end up there.

Was it harder to die, or harder to be the one who survived? I was sixteen, an orphan in Siberia, but I knew. It was the one thing I never questioned. I wanted to live. I wanted to see my brother grow up. I wanted to see Lithuania

When these people, my mother and people like her, came out here it was like leaving a reality; leaving a planet; turning your back. I guess we don’t appreciate it was such a big deal that they may never come back, never see their family again. – John Savić

The past has a way of walking around in the present, behaving as if it were alive.

It is estimated that Josef Stalin killed more than twenty million people during his reign of terror. The Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia lost more than a third of their population during the Soviet genocide. The deportations reached as far as Finland. To this day, many Russians deny they ever deported a single person. But most Baltic people harbor no grudge, resentment, or ill will. They are grateful to the Soviets who showed compassion. Their freedom is precious, and they are learning to live within it. For some, the liberties we have as American citizens came at the expense of people who lie in unmarked graves in Siberia. Like Joana for Lina, our freedom cost them theirs. Some wars are about bombing. For the people of the Baltics, this war was about believing. In 1991, after 50 years of brutal occupation, the three Baltic countries regained their independence, peacefully and with dignity. They chose hope over hate and showed the world that even through the darkest night, there is light. Please research it. Tell someone. These three tiny nations have taught us that love is the most powerful army. Whether love of friend, love of country, love of God, or even love of enemy - love reveals to us the truly miraculous nature of the human spirit.

I like it! I liked it when man to man no matter whether he is boss or he is ordinary worker, but in meantime they go to the pub, they drink beer together and call by first name. I like that. After few years, I think that Queensland is the best place in Australia … I am Queenslander! – Alex Sucharsky, Ukranian

American students, we are told, are falling behind in reading and math; on test after test, they score below most European students (at the level of Lithuania), and the solution, rather than seeking to engage their curiosity, has been testing and more testing— a dry and brittle method that produces lackluster results. And so resources are pulled from the “soft” fields that are not being tested. Music teachers are being fired or not replaced; art classes are quietly dropped from the curriculum; history is simplified and moralized, with little expectation that any facts will be learned or retained; and instead of reading short stories, poems and novels, students are invited to read train schedules and EPA reports whose jargon could put even the most committed environmentalist to sleep.

„… lietuvių tauta privalo būti išsaugota, nes joje slypi raktas visoms mįslėms – ne tik filologijos, bet ir istorijos — įminti”.

Papa Ubu: Captain Bordure, I've decided to make you Duke of Lithuania.

She preferred silence. So I do not know her and yet I know her. She was . . . (He touches the coffin) . . . not a person but a whole kind of person, the ones who crossed the ocean, who brought with us to America the villages of Russia and Lithuania—and how we struggled, and how we fought, for the family, for the Jewish home, so that you would not grow up here, in this strange place, in the melting pot where nothing melted.

Pirmi krinta geriausieji.

A soldier: "I know where heaven is and it's Lithuania ... The women are beautiful, pagan, with a practical view towards sex. Who says communism was bad? You're working three levels of advantages: you're a foreign male, you're a rich, exotic American, and their men are a bunch of drunken, criminal slobs.

The neighborhood-towns were part of larger ethnic states. To the north of the Loop was Germany. To the northwest was Poland. To the west were Italy and Israel. To the southwest were Bohemia and Lithuania. And to the south was ireland... you could always tell, even with your eyes closed, which state you were in by the odors of the food stores and the open kitchen windows, the sound of the foreign or familiar language, and by whether a stranger hit you in the head with a rock.

Trīs māsas: Igaunija, Latvija un Lietuva ir darinājušas katra par sevi savas kultūras gredzenu. Ikkatrs no tiem laistās savā īpatā daiļumā. Kārlis Skalbe

Kam yr valdžia, žmogau? Ogi tam, kad gyvenimas negerėtų!

I had never believed either in God, or in the Devil, or in a King, or in the Pope (as for the Revolution, so far I had no knowledge of it), but I had always been taught to recognize Grace and Beauty, and they alone, in my opinion, justified the curtseys, the fervor in our souls, the fullness of our hearts. — Max-Ulrich

in response to discrimination and persecution in the Holy Roman Empire. They had moved further east into the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and, despite the violence directed against them during the 1648 Ukrainian revolt, had continued this eastward pattern of migration and settlement into the eighteenth century. With the partitions of Poland, the areas of densest Jewish settlement came under Russian rule,

It grey louder. Louder. They were singing, singing at the top of their lungs. Andrius joined, and then my brother and the gray-haired man. And finally, the bald man joined in, singing out national anthem. 'Lithuania, land of heroes...

Unemployed people will use any number of excuses including discrimination for reasons such as disability, race, sexual orientation, religion, sex or age, or maybe there’s a shortage of jobs in their area. Well if that’s the case then they can travel to wherever the work is and go into digs. I work in construction management and regularly work with steel erectors from Ireland or Newcastle, electricians from Cardiff, fixers from Sheffield or Birmingham, steel fixers from Romania, carpenters from Poland, canteen girls from Romania, scaffolders from Lithuania, and concrete gangs of Indians, and they all travel wherever the work is and they all live in digs. We all do. It’s the nature of our industry.

Political calculation and local suffering do not entirely explain the participation in these pogroms. Violence against Jews served to bring the Germans and elements of the local non-Jewish populations closer together. Anger was directed, as the Germans wished, toward the Jews, rather than against collaborators with the Soviet regime as such. People who reacted to the Germans' urging knew that they were pleasing their new masters, whether or not they believed that the Jews were responsible for their own woes. By their actions they were confirming the Nazi worldview. The act of killing Jews as revenge for NKVD executions confirmed the Nazi understanding of the Soviet Union as a Jewish state. Violence against Jews also allowed local Estonians, Latvian, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Poles who had themselves cooperated with the Soviet regime to escape any such taint. The idea that only Jews served communists was convenient not just for the occupiers but for some of the occupied as well. Yet this psychic nazification would have been much more difficult without the palpable evidence of Soviet atrocities. The pogroms took place where the Soviets had recently arrived and where Soviet power was recently installed, where for the previous months Soviet organs of coercion had organized arrests, executions, and deportations. They were a joint production, a Nazi edition of a Soviet text. P. 196

Another letter complained about the soldiers suffering in Stalingrad, asking God why He let things like this happen to the brave German people. This letter was a classic. The godless barbarians who had forgotten the image of God in the hour of their victories, the murderers who were shooting tens of thousands of Jews and Russian prisons of without blinking an eye, suddenly now remembered that there was a God somewhere after all. Where was God when they were massacring innocent women and children in the forts of Lithuania, piling them on top of the other in huge mass graves? Why didn't they look up to Him at that hour? But at that time they were playing God themselves, with the lives of millions of "subhumans." Oh, how good it felt to hear a German Nazi clamour of God! God! This was our revenge. God was no in Stalingrad. This was the Ninth Fort for the Germans.

after all that, after the concentration camps in Germany, after we stated definitely that our former home was changed into a mass grave, we can only grope and clasp with our finger tips the shadows of our dearest and painfully cry: I can never more see my home. The victorious nations that in the 20th century removed the black plague from Europe must understand once and for all the specific Jewish problem. No, we are not Polish when we are born in Poland; we are not Lithuanians even though we once passed through Lithuania; and we are neither Roumanians though we have seen the first time in our life the sunshine in Roumenia. We are Jews!!

It is estimated that Josef Stalin killed more than twenty million people during his reign of terror. The Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia lost more than a third of their population during the Soviet annihilation. The deportations reached as far as Finland. To this day, many Russians deny they ever deported a single person. But most Baltic people harbor no grudge, resentment, or ill will. They are grateful to the Soviets who showed compassion. Their freedom is precious, and they are learning to live within it. For some, the liberties we have as American citizens came at the expense of people who lie in unmarked graves in Siberia.

Discord, in large part fueled by Moscow, was the order of the day in several other bordering nations; the invasion of Estonia was unsuccessful, but there remained the threat of invasion in Ukraine. In addition to this, a near–civil war in Georgia, bitterly disputed presidential campaigns in Latvia and Lithuania, riots and protests in other nearby countries.

Išjudinti provincijos žmogų sunkiau nei traukinį.

Kas šlovingiau: metų metais eit Europon ar kas vakarą pareit namo ir pašert kiaules?

Mokslas dar nedavė aiškaus atsakymo, kuris būtent galas yra pirmas.

Norint gyventi Lietuvoje ar Ukrainoje, kol kas reikia mokėti naudotis ir plunksna, ir automatu. Ne vien tik plunksna, ne vien tik automatu, o abiem.

To make his point, Ivan staged a sensational demonstration. Some time before Christmas he had arrested two Lithuanians employed in the Moscow Kremlin. He charged them with plotting to poison him. The accusations against Jan Lukhomski and Maciej the Pole did not sound very credible; but their guilt or innocence was hardly relevant. They were held in an open cage on the frozen Moskva River for all the world to see; and on the eve of the departure of Ivan’s envoy to Lithuania, they were burned alive in their cage.50 As the ice melted under the fierce heat of the fire and the heavy iron cage sank beneath the water, taking its carbonized occupants down in a great hiss of steam, one could have well imagined that something was being said about Lithuania’s political future.

Eventually they [Sarunas Marciulionis and Don Nelson] got a call from a representative of the Grateful Dead, whose members had been inspired by Lithuania's struggle for independence. Nelson and Marciulionis showed up at the address they were given in San Francisco, which was a small, nondescript garage. 'I thought we were the victim of a practical joke until we opened the door and there was a state-of-the-art recording studio' says Nelson. 'I still remember the Dead were trying out Beatles covers, doing stuff like "Here Comes the Sun" and "Hey Jude"... but they were just kind of working through things and sounding kind of nasally and, well, maybe there was a little pot going on. So Sarunas pulls me aside and says 'Donnie, no way these guys are famous. They're terrible.' '.

An expert in international relations, a reasonable woman with a rich deep voice, advised me that the world was not well. She considered two common states of mind: self-pity and aggression. Each one a poor choice for individuals. In combination, for groups or nations, a noxious brew that lately intoxicated the Russians in Ukraine, as it once had their friends, the Serbs in their part of the world. We were belittled, now we will prove ourselves. Now that the Russian state was the political arm of organised crime, another war in Europe no longer inconceivable. Dust down the tank divisions for Lithuania’s southern border, for the north German plain. The same potion inflames the barbaric fringes of Islam. The cup is drained, the same cry goes up: we’ve been humiliated, we’ll be avenged.

During the Second World War 70,000 Jews were murdered in Latvia, 30,000 of them by summer 1941. In Lithuania, almost all of the country’s 200,000 Jews were killed. (In Estonia there were only 5,000 Jews to start with, and most of them were able to escape to the Soviet Union.) In his official report, one German officer characterised the farmers’ hatred of the Jews as ‘monstrous’. They had, as he wrote on 16 August, 1941, ‘already done a great deal of the dirty work’ before the Germans could intervene.

Congress, in the twenties, put an end to the dangerous, turbulent flood of immigrants (14 million between 1900 and 1920) by passing laws setting immigration quotas: the quotas favored Anglo-Saxons, kept out black and yellow people, limited severely the coming of Latins, Slavs, Jews. No African country could send more than 100 people; 100 was the limit for China, for Bulgaria, for Palestine; 34,007 could come from England or Northern Ireland, but only 3,845 from Italy; 51,227 from Germany, but only 124 from Lithuania; 28,567 from the Irish Free State, but only 2,248 from Russia.

In late 1983, Lithuania’s brand new Ignalina Power Station began commission testing its first RBMK reactor and soon encountered a problem: control rods entering the reactor together caused a power surge. This is basically what caused the Chernobyl disaster a few years later. At Ignalina, the fuel was brand new, the reactor was stable, and the rods travelled down the entire height of the core, allowing boron to be introduced and the reaction to be brought back under control. This critical discovery was passed around the relevant nuclear Ministries and Institutes, but again nothing changed.

The secret protocol of the Hitler-Stalin Pact partitioned Poland between the two signatories and gave the Soviets a free hand over Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, Bessarabia, and Northern Bukovina. Most of these new countries were Catholic, which in Stalin’s mind meant subordinated to a foreign power—the Vatican. That was unacceptable for the man who had become the Soviet Union’s only god—at whose order 168,300 Russian Orthodox clergy had been arrested during the purges of 1936–1938 alone, 100,000 of whom had been shot.4 The Russian Orthodox Church, which had had more than fifty-five thousand parishes in 1914, was now reduced to five hundred.5

The Blade of Grass from Ponar I kept a letter from my hometown in Lithuania, from one who still holds a dominion somewhere with her youthful charm. In it she placed her sorrow and her affection: A blade of grass from Ponar. This blade of grass with a flickering puff of dying cloud ignited, letter by letter, the faces of the letters. And over letter-faces in murmuring smolder: The blade of grass from Ponar. This blade of grass is now my world, my miniature home, where children play the fiddle in a line on fire. They play the fiddle and legendary is their conductor: The blade of grass from Ponar. I will not separate from my hometown’s blade of grass. My good, longed-for earth will make room for both. And then I will bring a gift to the Lord: The blade of grass from Ponar.

Kas nežino: istoriją kuria žmonės! Bet kai istorija jau būna sukurta, sklaidydami jos puslapius žmonių kažkodėl nebematome. Šmėkso Vytautas, Algirdas, Gediminas, Napoleonas ir kitokios pamėklės, kurių vieninteliai nuopelnai ir sugebėjimai: melžt žmogų, siurbt kraują ir kur pakliūva švaistytis kardais bei įstatymais. O kur Antanas, Albinas, Albertynas ir Patriūbavičius? Jie melžia karves ir švaistosi šakėmis ant mėšlo krūvos.

Christianity spread across northern Europe more or less from west to east, slowly, but with greater speed after 950 or so. Ireland was first, in the fifth and sixth centuries; there followed Pictish Scotland, England and central Germany in the seventh century, Saxony – by force as we have seen – after Charlemagne’s conquests in the eighth, Bulgaria, Croatia and Moravia in the ninth, Bohemia in the tenth, Poland, Rus’ (covering parts of European Russia and Ukraine) and Denmark in the late tenth, Norway, Iceland and Hungary in the years around 1000, Sweden more slowly across the eleventh century.3 Only the far north-east of Europe was left out of this, the Baltic- and Finnish-speaking lands, the former of which would eventually, in the thirteenth century, turn into the only large and powerful pagan polity in medieval Europe, Lithuania, before its grand dukes went Christian as late as 1386–87.

The most important individuals on earth have went underground, either for political, social or personal reasons. Ostracized by a society that ignores their most basic rights, they work alone to save the world. Invisible to the five senses, they work from the most unbelievable places, places where they're hardly found, or when found never recognized. I change country at an average of three to six times a year, and travel to places as unpredictable as Lithuania, Julian Assange is in the Equator's Embassy in England, David Icke lives in a tiny apartment in a Island that few have heard about, and then there are many others that you've never seen or met. Without us, there would be no meaning for hope. We may one day be found and recognized, maybe even get statues and other works of art in our name and that will likely happen after we're gone. So we can't say we're doing it for the money or recognition. We're risking our lives for those that show no appreciation or support, for those that rather spend 10 dollars in a meal than two in a book, for those that to a great extent have ridicule us for a longer time than the one in which they've shown respect.

One of the few entry points to the Baltic Sea, the Kattegat passage is a busy and treacherous waterway. The entire region is a maze of fractured islands, shallow waters and tricky cur-rents which test the skills of all mariners. A vital sea route, the strait is used by large container ships, oil tankers and cruise ships alike and provides a crucial link between the Baltic coun-tries and Europe and the rest of the world. Navigating is difficult even in calm weather and clear visibility is a rare occurrence in these higher latitudes. During severe winters, it’s not uncommon for sections of the Baltic Sea to freeze, with ice occasionally drifting out of the straits, carried by the surface currents. The ship I was commandeering was on a back-and-forth ‘pendulum’ run, stopping at the ports of St Petersburg (Russia), Kotka (Finland), Gdańsk (Poland), Aarhus (Denmark) and Klaipėda (Lithuania) in the Baltic Sea, and Bremerhaven (Ger-many) and Rotterdam (Netherlands) in the North Sea. On this particular trip, the weather gods were in a benevolent mood and we were transiting under a faultless blue sky in one of the most picturesque regions of the world. The strait got narrower as we sailed closer to Zealand (Sjælland), the largest of the off-lying Danish islands. Up ahead, as we zigzagged through the laby-rinth of islands, the tall and majestic Great Belt Bridge sprang into view. The pylons lift the suspension bridge some sixty-five metres above sea level allowing it to accommodate the largest of the ocean cruise liners that frequently pass under its domi-nating expanse.

Page 141: Group Polarization Patterns Political anger and demands for privileges are, of course, not limited to the less privileged. Indeed, even when demands are made in the name of less privileged racial or ethnic groups, often it is the more privileged members of such groups who make the demands and who benefit from policies designed to meet such demands. These demands may erupt suddenly in the wake of the creation (or sharp enlargement) of a newly educated class which sees its path to coveted middle-class professions blocked by competition of other groups--as in India, French Canada, or Lithuania, for example. * * * A rapid expansion of education is thus a factor in producing inter-group conflict, especially where the education is of a kind which produces diplomas rather than skills that have significant economic value in the marketplace. Education of a sort useful only for being a clerk, bureaucrat, school teacher--jobs whose numbers are relatively fixed in the short run and politically determined in the long run--tend to increase politicized inter-group strife. Yet newly emerging groups, whether in their own countries or abroad, tend to specialize precisely in such undemanding fields. Malay students, for example, have tended to specialize in Malay studies and Islamic studies, which provide them with no skills with which compete with the Chinese in the marketplace, either as businessmen, independent professionals, or technicians. Blacks and Hispanics in the United States follow a very similar pattern of specializing disproportionately in easier fields which offer less in the way of marketable skills. Such groups then have little choice but to turn to the government, not just for jobs but also for group preferences to be imposed in the market place, and for symbolic recognition in various forms. *** While economic interests are sometimes significant in explaining political decisions, they are by no means universally valid explanations. Educated elites from less advanced groups may have ample economic incentives to promote polarization and preferential treatment policies, but the real question is why the uneducated masses from such groups give them the political support without which they would be impotent. Indeed, it is often the less educated masses who unleash the mob violence from which their elite compatriots ultimately benefit--as in Malaysia, Sri Lanka, or parts of India, Africa, or the United States, where such violence has led to group preference policies in employment, educational institutions, and elsewhere. The common denominator in these highly disparate societies seems to be not only resentment of other groups' success but also fear of an inability to compete with them, combined with a painful embarrassment at being so visibly "under-represented"--or missing entirely—in prestigious occupations and institutions. To remedy this within apolitically relevant time horizon requires not simply increased opportunities but earmarked benefits directly given on a racial or ethnic basis.

740 Khazaria In 740 A.D. in a land locked between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, known as Khazaria, a land which today is predominantly occupied by Georgia, but also reaches into Russia, Poland, Lithuania, Hungary, and Romania, the modern Jewish race is born. A modern Jewish race that incidentally is not Jewish.

But, he isn’t wearing anything at all!” Such plainspoken truth is urgently needed to dispel a myth that hobbles European strategic thinking: that Europe is too dependent on Russian natural gas to risk a serious row with Russia over its escalating war against Ukraine. As Moscow prepares to instigate a crisis over this winter’s natural gas supplies, Europe can secure its interests by remembering that Russia is dependent on Europe as its primary gas export market – and by preparing to weather the winter without buying Russian gas. This spring, while Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine were gearing up for action, President Vladimir Putin tried to intimidate European leaders by suggesting that the Kremlin might redirect natural gas from Europe to China in retaliation for any EU sanctions. On May 21, Mr Putin suddenly reversed a decade of resistance and caved in to Chinese demands for a lower gas price, accepting $350 per thousand cubic metres. That is 42 per cent less than the price Lithuania pays – so low that it risks depressing natural gas prices throughout the Far East, including for future Russian sales to Japan. Moreover, Moscow will have to borrow $50bn to pay for new pipelines and other infrastructure, costs that must be repaid out of the paltry revenues. Mr Putin was willing to accept such poor economics because his main goal was political: to intimidate Europe. But behind the grandstanding, the Russian president knows that Europe is the only viable market for Russian natural gas, and that it will continue to be so for decades.

The Chronicle of Guillaume de Nangis, written by a monk at the Abbey of Saint-Denis, records their start in the middle of April. Other accounts have the storms arriving in Flanders around Pentecost, May 11. The abbot of Saint-Vincent, near Laon, noted that “it rained most marvelously and for so long.” So long, in fact, that it didn’t stop, except for a day or two, until August. By one count, it rained for 155 days in a row, virtually everywhere in Europe north of the Pyrenees and Alps, and west of the Urals: throughout France, Britain, the Baltic and German principalities, Poland, and Lithuania.

But the heart and soul of the Other Dream Team, as some called Lithuania, was the mustachioed guard Sarunas Marciulionis. It was Marciulionis, the first from the Soviet Union to play in the N.B.A., who secured the team’s financing by gaining the support of the Grateful Dead — helping explain the tie-dyed warm-ups — and he played spectacularly, averaging 23.4 points and 8.3 assists a game.

Aiva Rozenberga was 13 years old when 2 million people stood hand in hand in 1989 across the three Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, forming a gigantic, peaceful human chain of defiance of Soviet occupation later called the Baltic Chain. Their voices raised in song, music carried the message: “We want freedom!” This past January, to kick off the tenure of Riga, Latvia, as a European Capital of Culture, 15,000 Latvians stood shoulder to shoulder again, this time passing books from one hand to the other to bring them from the current library to a new library across the Daugava River. Ms. Rozenberga was part of the chain, as program director for Riga 2014, the foundation that put together this year’s program of events. The chain of book lovers epitomizes the power of culture in a small, vulnerable country.

The Soviet Union had achieved an unusual boon through the pact. The Eastern part of Europe, from the Baltic to the Black Sea was declared as their sphere of influence. They spelled out by name the three Baltic republics: Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia - all three formerly, under the tsars, Russian territory. The two signatories included as part of the Soviet sphere of influence Bessarabia. Northern Bukovina had not been included in that sinister deal, yet Russia made its own decision to annex it, together with Bessarabia. They made it a kind of connecting bridge to Southern Poland.

on 3 March 1918 the new Soviet republic signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany, ending the war on the Eastern Front. It was a humiliation for Russia. The country lost one-quarter of the former Russian Empire’s population and industry, including 90 per cent of its coalmines. It renounced all territorial claims to Finland, Belarus and Ukraine, and the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Poland became an independent state. The driving force behind the signing of the treaty was Lenin. Despite the enormous losses, he believed that only an immediate peace would allow the young Bolshevik government to consolidate power in Russia, against all its enemies.

the libel that Jews ritually murdered Christian children to mix their blood in the unleavened bread baked at Passover appears to have originated in twelfth-century England. By the fifteenth century it had reached German-speaking Central Europe; by the sixteenth, Poland, and by the eighteenth century it was firmly established all over Eastern Europe, from Lithuania to Romania. In 1840 there was an international outcry over a ‘blood libel’ case in Damascus. But such allegations did not manifest themselves in Russia until the later nineteenth century. Nor was outright violence against Jewish communities a Russian tradition. What became known in Russia as ‘pogroms’ – literally ‘after thunder’ – had been a recurrent feature of life in Western and Central Europe from medieval times onwards.

A Lithuanian friend asked me what am I doing in Lithuania. If I knew the answer I would probably not be in Lithuania talking to her.

The final, and most important, consideration concerns personal motivation. When I started the partnership I set the motor that regulated the treadmill at “ten points better than the DOW.” I was younger, poorer and probably more competitive. Even without the three previously discussed external factors making for poorer performance, I would still feel that changed personal conditions make it advisable to reduce the speed of the treadmill. I have observed many cases of habit patterns in all activities of life, particularly business, continuing (and becoming accentuated as years pass) long after they ceased making sense. Bertrand Russell has related the story of two Lithuanian girls who lived at his manor subsequent to World War I. Regularly each evening after the house was dark, they would sneak out and steal vegetables from the neighbors for hoarding in their rooms; this despite the fact that food was bountiful at the Russell table. Lord Russell explained to the girls that while such behavior may have made a great deal of sense in Lithuania during the war, it was somewhat out of place in the English countryside. He received assenting nods and continued stealing. He finally contented himself with the observation that their behavior, strange as it might seem to the neighbors, was really not so different from that of the elder Rockefeller. Elementary

I told Benny that I had plans to go to Belarus and Lithuania t see the places where our European relatives had lived and died. Halfway through the week, Benny decided to join me on what he called the 'roots trip,' and by the end of the week Shimon and his oldest son, Amir, and Benny's son Rotem had signed on too. I enlisted my daughter Emily, who speaks Russian. In the middle of May 2011, the six of us met at a small wooden inn deep in the lush green Belarusian countryside. Together we visited Rakov and Volozhin; we walked through the crumbling hall of the Volozhin yeshiva, which has survived two world wars and the death of its students and teachers; we scouted out the street near Rakov's brick Catholic church where Sonia, Doba, and Etl grew up. We traveled to Vilna - now Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania - and searched out the two apartment buildings where Doba and Shepseleh lived and raised their sons. We drove out to Ponar to say kaddish at the cratered pit where Shepseleh and tens of thousands of Lithuanian Jews lay buried. We walked to a hillside at the edge of Volozhin and said kaddish over the pit where Chaim's brother Yishayahu may have been shot. We said kaddish in the small grassy clearing where the Rakov synagogue burned with Etl and her children inside.

Although city career women, they still knew which mushrooms could be eaten and which not, without consulting a book.

nothing on the man MacQueen most wanted to nail: Lileikis, the onetime chief of Lithuania’s security police and a proud Massachusetts resident for the last thirty-five years.

Lileikis had been unanimously rejected for entry into America because he was “under the control of the Gestapo.” In fact, he had been investigated as a war criminal, his CIA file noted. As the CIA’s own notes made clear, Lileikis and people like him in power in Lithuania during the German occupation “were generally there because of their known Nazi sympathies.

In all, at least three dozen Lithuanian immigrants with ties to the Nazi massacres there found sanctuary in the United States beginning in the 1950s, clustered in Florida, Massachusetts, and Illinois. With U.S. immigration policies wide open to immigrants from the Nazi-occupied “captive nations” in the Baltics, these men had little difficulty getting into America, hiding themselves among thousands of legitimate war refugees from the region. More than a dozen of them came from a single Nazi-controlled battalion in Lithuania that carried out a string of massacres in the region that were considered brutal even by Third Reich standards. Resettled in America, these Nazi collaborators from Lithuania were now American success stories: leaders of their churches, pillars of their communities, exemplars for other U.S. immigrants.

Was that a slight smile that Rosenbaum thought he saw? The old man sounded smug, almost as if he were daring the Justice Department: Show me something that I signed. Lileikis had studied law in Lithuania, and he appeared to have learned it well. He wasn’t admitting anything. Rosenbaum knew he would need more than just Lileikis’s name typed on a prison form if he wanted to deport him.

Like Artukovic, many Nazi collaborators came from Eastern Europe. Hundreds of fugitives with Nazi ties came from Germany, but many more who wound up in America were collaborators from Nazi-controlled countries like Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and the Ukraine. American immigration policies made it easy for them to come. In the first few years after the war, fully 40 percent of all the visas granted by the United States were set aside for war refugees from the Baltics.

In the Museum of the Diaspora in Tel Aviv, written in large letters on the wall, I saw the answer: “A rabbi whose community does not disagree with him is not really a rabbi, and a rabbi who fears his community is not really a man.” The quotation is from Rabbi Israel Salanter, who died six years before Hitler was born; he flourished in Lithuania and Russia, so almost certainly some of his descendants died in the Nazis’ hell fires. I don’t know what he would say about Holocaust “revisionism” if he were alive today, but I do know that those words of his are displayed in the Museum of the Diaspora because the critical spirit they embody is the only spirit that can save the Jews, and the rest of us, from political meddling with history.

The traveler didn't see how such a place could exist in a world of Lithuanias and Polands. It was a testament to the insulatory effectiveness of political boundaries that power didn't simply arc across the gap between such divergent economic voltages.

In any case, on the wall of Juan Stein's house, there hung a rather ornately framed portrait of Chernyakhovsky, and that, I dare say, incommensurably more important than the busts and the cities named after him and the countless Chernyakhovsky Streets, full of potholes, scattered through the Ukraine, Belorussia, Lithuania and Russia. I don't know why I've kept the photo, Stein said to us.

Like Artukovic, many Nazi collaborators came from Eastern Europe. Hundreds of fugitives with Nazi ties came from Germany, but many more who wound up in America were collaborators from Nazi-controlled countries like Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and the Ukraine.

The most successful Japanese team, the Toyohashi Tengu, narrowly missed a win over Lithuania’s Gorodok Gargoyles in 1994. The Japanese practice of ceremonially setting fire to their brooms in case of defeat is, however, frowned upon by the International Confederation of Wizards’ Quidditch Committee as being a waste of good wood.

Europe. The numerous privileges granted the Jews, by Boleslaus of Kalish (1246), Kasimir the Great (1347-1370), Witowt (1388), Kasimir IV (1447), and some of their successors, fortified their position in the extended territory covered by Poland, Lithuania, and the Ukraine. Their peculiar circumstances in Poland

the framework of the conflict between former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Russian President Vladimir Putin, angered by U.S. intrusion in his wars in Georgia, Syria, Ukraine, the military seizure of Crimea, and pressures on NATO allies Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania, Putin may be unleashing Trump’s challenge as a way to exact revenge on the United States. Putin

Most East European girls don’t do one-night-stands, but some Lithuanian women do that. So if you are looking for some casual fun, you can find it in Lithuania. As long as your standards are not too high, because very high quality Lithuanian women don’t do one-night-stands, which means you can also find wife materials among Lithuanian women.

The birch remains. Never harm it.

Then there are the pro-Western countries formerly in the Warsaw Pact but now all in NATO and/or the EU: Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovakia, Albania and Romania. By no coincidence, many are among the states which suffered most under Soviet tyranny.

Brother, there’s reason to,” the friar returned. “Think—Jacek wished to send his son away To join the army—then he had him stay In Lithuania. Why? He’s needed here At home! You’ve heard the widespread talk, I’m sure— That I’ve brought fitful news about. Well, brother, It’s time to say it all to one another. This is momentous! War is here! A war For Poland! War, yes! We’ll be Poles once more! When I arrived here on my secret mission The vanguard was already in position Over the Niemen. Napoleon has grown A host such as the world has never known! And with the French there is a Polish force! Our Józef, our Dąbrowski, and of course All our white eagles! At the Emperor’s sign They’ll cross the river—and Poland lives again!

We do not see fire; we rarely see coal or oil. We’re frequent flyers but we have no idea about the size of the bonfire that could be ignited with 20 tons of jet fuel. We buy our airline tickets online but we never have to check in the oil barrels that will carry us out into the world. Take the time I went to a two-day poetry festival in Lithuania, a journey of around 1,750 miles, the same distance as Chicago to Los Angeles. A barrel of oil holds about 42 gallons, so a single airline passenger burns through about three-quarters of a barrel on such a flight: up to one gallon every 60 miles.

Chip was struck by the broad similarities between black-market Lithuania and free-market America. In both countries, wealth was concentrated in the hands of a few; any meaningful distinction between private and public sectors had disappeared; captains of commerce lived in a ceaseless anxiety that drove them to expand their empires ruthlessly; ordinary citizens lived in ceaseless fear of being fired and ceaseless confusion about which powerful private interest owned which formerly public institution on any given day; and the economy was fueled largely by the elite’s insatiable demand for luxury.

This in turn reduces that country’s foreign policy options. Latvia, Slovakia, Finland and Estonia are 100 per cent reliant on Russian gas, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria and Lithuania are 80 per cent dependent, and Greece, Austria and Hungary 60 per cent. About half of Germany’s gas consumption comes from Russia, which, along with extensive trade deals, is partly why German politicians tend to be slower to criticise the Kremlin for aggressive behaviour than a country such as Britain, which not only has 13 per cent dependency, but also has its own gas-producing industry, including reserves of up to nine months’ supply.

On the eve of the Second World War, almost ten million Jews had lived in Europe; by the mid 1990s less than two million remained.3 After the war, Jewry practically ceased to exist in Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Germany and Austria, the countries that had been its main centres.

The Commonwealth attained its greatest glory when its Polish and Lithuanian knights and its Ukrainian Cossacks fought side by side.

Freedom is a very scary thing, especially in countries where the majority does not have it. Whenever a population is trapped in social conditioning and cultural bias, they get easily scared with anyone who breaks apart with these rules. They are in a constant state of neuroticism. That's the situation with post-sovietic nations. They have absorbed their traumas to such an extent that they now consider those traumas part of their culture. I remember when once I was in Lithuania, eating a croissant, and reading a book written by the Dalai Lama, and three security guards approached me as if I was committing a crime. They started asking personal questions in Russian and asking for my ID, which I refused to give. When I asked why they were behaving in such a paranoid way, since I was not next to some parliament or other high security building, but next to a shopping mall, from where they came, they answered: "We have been watching you through the security cameras since you arrived at 7AM, and it's 10AM now, and you are still here, reading a book and drinking your coffee. We find that very suspicious." That was the most idiotic thing I heard in my entire life. But it does reveal how stupid people can be when they don't understand anything about life. Whatsoever escapes the small peanut size brain they have, automatically scares them, especially in countries where they don't really think, such as the case of the Lithuanians — the most pathetic people I ever met in my entire life. Many stupid things happen in this country, and that the locals call "our culture". Let it be then, that the culture of the stupid is to be stupid and xenophobic, and act stupid and xenophobic. But you can't be sympathetic of such nations when some lunatic attempts to erase them from the map because that's karma.

The last Lithuanian grand duke who even knew the Lithuanian language died the year Columbus discovered America.

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His name meant originally “Jew from Lithuania” and was once derogatory. How did he see himself? One day as a twenty-four-year-old kibbutz orphan without a known relation alive, another as the adopted child of an American Orthodox foundation and the Israeli special forces. On another again, as God’s devoted policeman, cleaning the world up. He played the piano wonderfully.

In the wake of the Black Death, Ashkenazic Jews pushed eastward into Poland, Lithuania, and Ukraine. It is this large region that would become the heartland of a pious, Yiddish-speaking population, growing from thousands of Jews in the fourteenth century to more than 6 million in 1900 and making it by that point the largest Jewish community in the world several times

My grandfather Alexander and my grandmother Shlomit, with my father and his elder brother David, on the other hand, did not go to Palestine even though they were also ardent Zionists: the conditions of life there seemed too Asiatic to them, so they went to Vilna, the capital of Lithuania, and arrived there only in 1933, by which time, as it turned out, anti-Semitism in Vilna had grown to the point of violence against Jewish students. My Uncle David especially was a confirmed European, at a time when, it seems, no one else in Europe was, apart from the members of my family and other Jews like them. Everyone else turns out to have been Pan-Slavic, PanGermanic, or simply Latvian, Bulgarian, Irish, or Slovak patriots. The only Europeans in the whole of Europe in the 1920s and 1930s were the Jews. My father always used to say: In Czechoslovakia there are three nations, the Czechs, the Slovaks, and the Czecho-Slovaks, i.e., the Jews; in Yugoslavia there are Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, and Montenegrines, but, even there, there lives a group of unmistakable Yugoslavs; and even in Stalin’s empire there are Russians, there are Ukrainians, and there are Uzbeks and Chukchis and Tatars, and among them are our brethren, the only real members of a Soviet nation.

Nijole Laurinkiene connects this “Iron Boba” with the German grain woman, who is also associated with iron. He notes that “Goddess stones” were also kept in granaries in Lithuania. He equates her with the Lithuanian Goddess “Zemyna.”23 It is worth noting that “Zemyna” simply means “earth,” and is cognate to the equivalent Slavic word. For instance, in Russian folklore, peasants would sometimes address a personified “Mat Syra Zemlya” or “Moist Mother Earth.

A new spirit had taken hold of Eastern Europe by 1900. It might be most easily characterized as a violent disjuncture between the heart and the head. Materially, things had never been better. Europe was nearing the end of almost a half-century of (barely) interrupted peace. Most adults had never heard a shot fired in anger. That same half-century witnessed an unprecedented burst of economic growth and technical innovation. When steamships were dropping passengers off at Dereszewicze, citizens of Budapest were already riding the city's first underground metro line, which had opened in 1896. Cities, for the first time, were illuminated at night, something Eastern Europe took an unexpected lead in: Lviv was the first city to use modern kerosene lamps, and Timişoara, in present-day Romania, was the first city in Europe to be lilt by electricity. Railways now crisscrossed the continent, reaching even Janina's home in the forgotten Lithuanian hamlet of Bieniakonie. Grain from Ukraine flooded the American market, while wood from the remotest forests of Lithuania could be shipped all the way to Liverpool and beyond. Buoyed by these new connections, landowners grew suddenly and unexpectedly rich. . . . But however prosperous things might have seemed, spiritually there was a feeling of mounting crisis. Everywhere people put their trust in progress and scientific discovery, to the detriment of older faiths. In politics, nationalism still held sway -- indeed its influence had never been greater -- but in the arts, its primacy had begun to wane. The great national bards were still being celebrated, ut more as icons of struggle than as writers to be read. Young people especially craved something new.

The three Baltic republics of the former Soviet Union, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, declined to join Russia in the successor Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and became EU members in 2004. Among the states that stayed with the CIS, six could claim to be European: Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine, and Russia itself. They could therefore, if they came to fulfil the conditions of stable democracy and competitive market economy, apply for membership of the EU.

In order to avoid incidents at night in which local inhabitants might be misidentified as enemy I had a large board prepared with the legend: Nuieste voie seara deamere prin sat moartea. Free translation (so a Romanian told me): ‘Being on the street at night is forbidden. It can mean death.

The energy required to perform a hundred or so Google searches, a number I easily surpass in a working week, would heat the water needed to make a cup of tea. According to Google’s own data, their electricity consumption in 2018 was just over 10 million megawatt hours, which is about the same as a small country like Lithuania. Data centers worldwide use about 1 percent of global electricity. Information and communication technologies contribute to more than 2 percent of the world’s carbon emissions, which is roughly the same as that of the aviation industry. Some studies expect this sector to use 20 percent of the world’s electricity by 2030.

Page 141: Political anger and demands for privileges are, of course, not limited to the less privileged. Indeed, even when demands are made in the name of less privileged racial or ethnic groups, often it is the more privileged members of such groups who make the demands and who benefit from policies designed to meet such demands. These demands may erupt suddenly in the wake of the creation (or sharp enlargement) of a newly educated class which sees its path to coveted middle-class professions blocked by competition of other groups--as in India, French Canada, or Lithuania, for example.

overwhelming support shown for the declaration both in the parliament and throughout Lithuania.

Communism — ladies and gentlemen, I say it without flinching: communism in eastern Europe, Russia, China, Mongolia, North Korea, and Cuba brought land reform and human services; a dramatic bettering of the living conditions of hundreds of millions of people on a scale never before or never since witnessed in human history, and that's something to appreciate. Communism transformed desperately poor countries into societies in which everyone had adequate food, shelter, medical care, and education, and some of us who come from poor families who carry around the hidden injuries of class are very impressed; are very, very impressed by these achievements and are not willing to dismiss them as economistic. To say that socialism doesn't work is to overlook the fact that it did work and it worked for hundreds of millions of people. 'But what about the democratic rights that they lost?' We hear U.S. leaders talking about 'restoring' democracy to the communist countries, but these countries—with the exception of Czechoslovakia—were not democracies before communism. Russia was a Czarist autocracy; Poland was a right-wing fascist dictatorship under Piłsudski, with concentration camps of its own; Albania was an Italian fascist protectorate as early as 1927; Cuba was a U.S.-sponsored dictatorship under that butcher Batista; Lithuania, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria were outright fascist regimes openly allied with Nazi Germany in World War 2. So, what—exactly what democracy are we talking about restoring? The socialist countries did not take away any rights that didn't exist there in the first place.

If Russia is to survive its demographic Twilight, it must do nothing less than absorb in whole or in part some 11 countries — Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Belarus, Moldova, Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia. This Twilight War will be a desperate, sprawling military conflict that will define European/Russian borderland for decades.

That is why everywhere in Russia, in the Ukraine, and in Lithuania, the Einsatzgruppen carried out the Final Solution by turning their machine guns on more than a million Jews, men, women, and children, and throwing them into huge mass graves, dug just moments before by the victims themselves.

in the hands of a few; any meaningful distinction between private and public sectors had disappeared; captains of commerce lived in a ceaseless anxiety that drove them to expand their empires ruthlessly; ordinary citizens lived in ceaseless fear of being fired and ceaseless confusion about which powerful private interest owned which formerly public institution on any given day; and the economy was fueled largely by the elite’s insatiable demand for luxury. (In Vilnius, by November of that dismal autumn, five criminal oligarchs were responsible for employing thousands of carpenters, bricklayers, craftsmen, cooks, prostitutes, barkeeps, auto mechanics, and bodyguards.) The main difference between America and Lithuania, as far as Chip could see, was that in America the wealthy few subdued the unwealthy many by means of mind-numbing and soul-killing entertainments and gadgetry and pharmaceuticals, whereas in Lithuania the powerful few subdued the unpowerful many by threatening violence.

Union of Lublin (1569), which created the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The borders between the kingdom and the duchy were realigned within the commonwealth, transferring most of the Ukrainian territories to the kingdom and leaving the Belarusian ones within the boundaries of the duchy. The union of Poland and Lithuania thus meant the separation of Ukraine and Belarus, and in that regard we can hardly overestimate the importance of the Union of Lublin. It would initiate the formation of the territory of modern Ukraine and its intellectual appropriation by the local elites.

The title ‘Lord of All-Rus'’ did not possess much basis either in history or in current reality. It came into the same category as that whereby the kings of England laid claim to France. In the 1490s, two-and-a-half centuries after all traces of a united Kievan Rus' had been destroyed, it had the same degree of credibility that the king of France might have enjoyed if, in his struggle with the German Empire, he had proclaimed himself ‘Lord of all the Franks’. By that time, it conflicted with the separate identity that the ‘Ruthenes’ of Lithuania had assumed from the ‘Russians’ of Moscow. Indeed, it all seemed sufficiently unreal for the Lithuanians to accept it as a small price to pay for Ivan’s good humour. They were not to know it, but they were conceding the ideological cornerstone of territorial ambitions that would be pursued for 500 years.

She knew precious little about Lithuania, she realized, and her ideas had run along the lines of Soviet concrete ghettos, TB-infected prisons, and a callous mafia. Somehow,

I was once driven north along Central Park, all the way from Chinatown. We hailed the cab in front of a building where Orthodox Jews still lived, so they shut down an elevator on Saturdays. In the taxi, I was with my mother. We were visiting her aunt, my great aunt, who was 93. She had no memory of the old country, Lithuania, but she'd been born there. Her parents escaped the pogroms so she could survived a century here. Her American prosperity was half a century of subsistence wages and thirty years of Medicare in an elevator building. The old country for the cab driver was Bangladesh, and he was a talker. He'd just graduated from college, and his prospects were good. He'd majored in a practical field, network engineering or something like that. Young and optimistic, he spoke fluent English. His big idea was to keep his countrymen out of the United States. America was great, but if he got overrun with foreigners, his kind in particular, it would be ruined. "Bangladesh is hot and crowded. Why would want to make America like that." He said this in all sincerity.

True, in her gown she had a fuller figure—but cltohes make some things smaller, some things bigger.

For today, thanks to recently discovered documents, the evidence shows that in the early days of their accession to power, the Nazis in Germany set out to build a society in which there simply would be no room for Jews. Toward the end of their reign, their goal changed: they decided to leave behind a world in ruins in which Jews would seem never to have existed. That is why everywhere in Russia, in the Ukraine, and in Lithuania, the Einsatzgruppen carried out the Final Solution by turning their machine guns on more than a million Jews, men, women, and children, and throwing them into huge mass graves, dug just moments before by the victims themselves. Special units would then disinter the corpses and burn them. Thus, for the first time in history, Jews were not only killed twice but denied burial in a cemetery. It is obvious that the war which Hitler and his accomplices waged was a war not only against Jewish men, women, and children, but also against Jewish religion, Jewish culture, Jewish tradition, therefore Jewish memory.