HINSEY: Could you begin by discussing your family's situation right before the first Soviet occupation of Lithuania?

VENCLOVA: I mentioned that we had moved from Klaipėda to Kaunas. Petras Cvirka and my aunt Maria were living in my grandfather's house, so we rented a small annex building from another professor's family, almost next door. My father again found employment as a high school teacher, but would lose his job at the beginning of 1940. This was due to a pacifist and mildly pro-Soviet poem he published in the literary press; it attracted the attention of President Smetona himself, who telephoned the minister of education and proposed that measures be taken against a politically suspect author. (It was a common practice in authoritarian Lithuania, though the country was far from fascist, even if it was considered as such by Stalinists.) Later, Father found a new job in a leftist newspaper, but our family was in dire straits.

HINSEY: As the war neared, independent Lithuania found itself in an unenviable position—

VENCLOVA: Lithuania had no diplomatic relations with Poland because of the Vilnius question. Nazi Germany, its neighbor to the west, was a genuine threat. In 1938, the Polish government had demanded the immediate establishment of diplomatic relations, which was viewed in Lithuania as a demand to abandon all claims to the capital. After some hesitation, the Lithuanian government conceded—it had virtually no alternative, since a Polish-Lithuanian war would have ended in Lithuania's defeat. Subsequently, Hitler demanded Klaipėda and Memel Territory. Since he could easily have crushed the country in two or three days, the government understood that it would have been pointless to resist. These two calamities had an immense psychological impact on the population. It must be remembered that President Smetona was a leader who had come to power in a coup d’état, established an authoritarian regime, ruled without a parliament, and was strongly disliked by a considerable portion of the country. Now he looked helpless, at the mercy of the surrounding powers. In the national imagination, Vilnius was seen as the heart of Lithuania, and Klaipėda—the country's only harbor—as its lungs. It was unlikely that the country could survive without either.