Forest Brothers

"If you were in Ukraine, the Baltic states, and in bits of Poland, the war began for you not when the Germans invaded but when the Soviet Union invaded – in areas of Poland in 1939 and the Baltic states in 1940. So the fact that Germans took over most of Europe subsequently is kind of neither here nor there because the war ends with the Soviets still in control. So if you’re a Lithuanian or a Latvian partisan, your main enemy is not really the Germans but the Soviets – they’re the ones that end up with your country and they’re the ones you have to fight against if you want your independence. So when the war came to an end for most of Europe in 1945 these partisans carried on fighting in units in the forests all the way into the 1950s. It was a bit of a David versus Goliath story, although in this case David doesn’t win – they were just overwhelmed by sheer weight of numbers in the 1950s. He was a Lithuanian student in 1944-45 when the Soviets re-entered his country. He and his family were staunch nationalists and they joined a group of partisans in order to try to fight against the Soviets. Initially it was all organised by the Lithuanian army, so they had huge units of men hiding in the woods conducting ambushes on Soviet troops. But they were no match for the Red Army and they started suffering some really terrible defeats. They then reorganised themselves into little partisan cells hiding out in little bunkers dotted around the woodlands. For years and years they fought this clandestine battle against the might of the Red Army. It reminds me of stories of the French resistance during the war. It’s the same sort of feeling of national pride, self-sacrifice and heroism that you get in those stories – it’s just that they are not resisting the Nazis, they’re resisting the Soviets. One of the really poignant things about the story is that he left Lithuania at the end of 1947 in order to inform the West about what was happening in his country. He travelled through all the border regions, travelling by night and hiding in the woods by day, and finally made his way through to the West. He linked up with the Americans and the British and told them what was going on, expecting they would come to Lithuania’s aid. But of course Britain and America didn’t want a full blown war with the Soviet Union and just sat on their hands. In the meantime, he was in Paris waiting for something to happen and that’s when he wrote these memoirs. He also fell in love with a woman there. It could have all ended happily for him had he stayed in the West. But he didn’t. He felt he really had to go back and share the fate of his countrymen. He got the CIA to give him a bit of training and they parachuted him back into Lithuania, where tragically he was eventually betrayed by one of his own friends and died in a shootout in 1951."