Regarding Laurence Fletcher and Lucy Fisher’s piece talking to second world war veterans about their memories of Victory in Europe (VE) Day (Report, FT.com, May 8), my parents and I spent part of May 1945 on a farm in Poland. We were refugees, having left our homeland of Lithuania in July 1944 as the Red Army approached. For my parents the first Soviet occupation of Lithuania in 1940-1941 was a lesson in what to expect from a second such occupation. But they never for one moment thought their country would be betrayed, as they saw it, by the allies and would not be able to return home to resume their lives.
In 1948, at the invitation of the British authorities in the British Zone of Germany, we settled in England, and it is in English soil that my parents lie buried, dying before Lithuania’s declaration of the restoration of its independence in 1990, which at least I was fortunate enough to see.
I visited their grave on Wednesday. On May 7, exactly 80 years ago, the German delegation led by General Alfred Jodl, chief of staff of the German Army, had gone to US General Dwight D Eisenhower’s headquarters in Reims, France, to sign the surrender documents that ended the European phase of the second world war.
For us Lithuanians the celebration of VE Day means something different than to the peoples of western Europe who ended up on the right side of the Iron Curtain. In the Baltics, we mark 1993 (1994 for Estonia) as the end of the second world war when the Soviet (by then Russian) army finally left our countries after almost five decades of occupation. Symbolically, Poland’s Lech Wałęsa saw off the last group of Russian troops on September 17, 1993, the anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland at a time when Hitler and Stalin were partners in crime.
Romas Kinka
Anglo-Baltic Information Consultancy
London E9, UK
