Ref article: https://vilnews.com/?p=10007

The border between Poland and the Lithuanian SSR was characterized by miles of high barbed wire fences, a wide no man's land with land mines, and high watchtowers at regular intervals.

Among others, shortly thereafter I witnessed Soviet bullet scars on Ridzene Hotel in Riga, Latvia, where I was staying as an economic expert of an international "blue ribbon" commission.

Once I tried to go for a weekend to Poland by bus via LT on my Canadian passport. I was warmly greeted in Lithuanian by the Sajudis Movement economic border people but stopped a couple of minutes later by the KGB who still were minding the Soviet political border even though LT declared independence back in 1990. For that reason, I was determined to use only Lithuanian or Polish to cross LT-PL border; I am fluent in Russian but I pretended that I do not understand what the KGB were saying when they saw my Canadian passport. They took away my passport and, while the busfull of people were staring at me in total silence, told the bus driver: nu i padarok ty nam privioz (what a gift you brought to us!). Well, now I am in trouble, I guessed. Later, via an LT translator, the KGB told me that this border crossing is for citizens of the USSR and the Polish People's Republic, not for Westerners. They took me off the bus, put on the ashfalt the middle of the road on a hot day under their watchful eye and I had to wait there for an evening bus going back to Vilnius; I did not reach Poland that time.

That was my last encounter with the communist security police; the first one was in Poland when I was just 15 years of age, arrested, interrogated, harassed, otherwise persecuted, etc, and expelled from high school for organizing an anticommunist self-learning group that was collecting evidence of political persecutions in the Soviet occupied LT and trying to bring the evidence to the public.

Valdas Samonis
Toronto