America's important
role for Lithuania

The ‘Lithuanian’ senator, Richard ‘Dick’ Durbin (67) with President Barack Obama.

Durbin is the senior United States Senator from Illinois and the Senate Majority Whip, the second highest position in the Democratic Party leadership in the Senate. Durbin was born in Illinois to an Irish-American father, William Durbin, and a Lithuanian-born mother, Ann Kutkin (Lithuanian: Ona Kutkaitė). Durbin has over many years done a truly great job not only for America but also for his motherland, Lithuania!

Text: Aage Myhre, Editor-in-Chief
aage.myhre@VilNews.com

During a visit to the U.S. some years ago I spoke with immigrants from various countries who now live in the United States. All with one thing in common; that they had abandoned their homelands. I met exiled Cubans. I saw Iranians who fled to USA after their Shah, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, was overthrown from the Persian Peacock Throne in 1979. I talked to many Eastern Europeans who escaped Stalin's atrocities during and after World War II. I talked to Jews who were born in the U.S., but still feeling and having very close ties to Israel.

It strikes me that the U.S. has done much more for exiled nationalities than what our Western European nations have done.

It was probably not without reason that the majority of Eastern Europeans who managed to flee westwards towards the end of World War II preferred the U.S. over Western Europe. For in truth our Western European support to our eastern brothers and sisters was rather half-hearted during the post-war years.

The incredibly bloody partisan war that the Balts fought against the Soviet occupiers in the years 1944-1953 was barely mentioned in Western Europe.

The fact that over 100 000 people were killed, tortured and assassinated right outside our own doorsteps got shamefully little attention.

U.S. government too did little to support the Eastern European countries' demand to regain their freedom as they had before the war. But it was here in the U.S. that very important exile groups were able to establish themselves and begin the long struggle against Soviet perpetrators.

Information on the countries' own language played an invaluable role. Radio signals reached behind the Iron Curtain...

The radio station 'Voice of America' played an
invaluable role.

Members of the LAC, 'The Lithuanian-American Community Inc.', protests
outside the Capitol in Washington in 1990, against the Soviet Union's new assaults in the Baltic States.
Photo: UPI, Joe Mahoney.

"Chicago is Lithuania's second largest city," said the young man smilingly when he welcomed me to the LWC, the Lithuanian World Center in Lemont in the outskirts of Chicago. It is an impressive centre, with a church and much more which this 'nation outside of the nation' has built. It was here from Chicago that the struggle against the Soviet occupation of the Baltic states continued nonstop from World War II until liberation finally came in 1990-1991.

Sadly, I have over the latest 20 years seen that today's Lithuanians do not much appreciate the enormous efforts that Lithuanian-Americans did through nearly 50 years. This now little country at the Baltic Sea’s southern coast doesn’t need ‘outsiders’. Better to reinvent the wheel than to ask for advice or cooperation...

I hear statements like; ‘those who fled to the United States were living the good life, while those who weren’t that lucky were subjected to deportations and atrocities of the Soviet power’.

What I also see is that Lithuania's leaders only very hesitantly want their countrymen and women welcomed home after the 50 painful years of cold war between east and west.

It is no secret that it was Lithuania's leading citizens who managed to get out before the Iron Curtain so brutally closed the escape route in 1944. Many of them have later done very well in the United States. Unfortunately is the formidable resource Lithuanian-Americans represent not significantly appreciated.

Lithuania is about to lose a tremendous opportunity. But all hope is not lost.