Lithuanians at the Sea of Laptevs

The memoirs of Lithuanian doctor Dalia Grinkevičiūtė (1927–1987) come from various periods; some were published during her lifetime, but not in Lithuania itself. The first part consists of notes from her exile in faraway Siberia, where the occupying Soviet regime deported Dalia Grinkevičiūtė and her family in 1941, when she was fourteen years old. The fact that the narrator is a girl on the threshold of adulthood makes her accounts even more harrowing and highlights the incomprehensible cruelty and inhumanity of the Soviet regime, for which human life had no value. However, even the subsequent part of the memoirs, describing her experiences from her medical practice and daily life in Kaunas in the 1960s and 1970s, does not make for encouraging reading – the suffocating atmosphere of constant vetting, surveillance, and persecution surrounded the author until the end of her life. It is all the more admirable that, despite the danger, she persevered in her efforts and brought to the world a testimony not only of the tragic history of the Lithuanian nation but also of the indomitability of her own spirit.