The struggle

From Vilnius he wrote ordinary letters home about his pay, the children’s health and their schooling. In March 1941 he wrote to his mother:

“Although the world has gone mad and the war rages ever wider, as for our little corner I do not expect any greater danger…”Letter to his mother, 8 March 1941

His fellow student Vincas Žilys, sent to teach at the artillery academy in Moscow, was arrested and deported to the North. J. Vitkus escaped that fate.

In June 1941 the war caught him at the Pabradė–Švenčionėliai training ground. The War School was ordered to retreat deep into Russia. On the way east the column was strafed by aircraft. J. Vitkus and Colonel Karolis Dabulevičius hid in a rye field and a ditch. They were searched for but not found, and the train left without them. Both tore off their Red Army insignia and, helped by local people, returned to Vilnius. Soon J. Vitkus went to Kaunas, contacted the Provisional Government and, putting on an old Lithuanian uniform, joined those trying to restore Lithuanian units.

The Nazi authorities did not recognise Lithuania’s autonomy, and in May 1942 Catholic young people formed the underground Lithuanian Front. J. Vitkus was one of the founders and a staff member of its military organisation “Kęstutis”. The first underground meetings were held in the daytime, in his office at the Vilnius housing administration on Gediminas Avenue. Sometimes they met in a flat on Uosto Street, pretending to be card players. All had sworn not to betray the plans even on pain of death.

“Colonel Vitkus impressed us with his intellect, courage, logical decisions and administrative experience.”Testimony of his underground comrade Arbas-Arbačiauskas

The underground protected young people from German military conscription, supported the families of those mobilised and stockpiled means for the fight. In autumn 1942 J. Vitkus began teaching military engineering, unpaid and to his own syllabus, at the underground school of the Lithuanian Freedom Army (LLA). His students swore allegiance to the LLA and joined the resistance.

Caution was needed under the German occupation too. At home he kept a coiled rope so that, if necessary, he could let himself down from the balcony and escape.

He could no longer find work: many knew he was a high-ranking officer and were afraid to take the risk. In August 1944 he was in Panemunė with his family, preparing firewood for the winter and working in the garden and orchard. It was a farewell. When he went to Vilnius, former neighbours told him Soviet agents had already visited his flat six times. After that he came to Panemunė only in secret.

He told neither his wife nor his children about his underground activity. The less the family knew, the less danger they faced under interrogation. On 28 October 1944 his youngest son, Liudas, was born. At Christmas Juozas visited home and said he would be working as bookkeeper of the Kabeliai forestry office in Dzūkija. Both understood it was a cover.

According to NKVD data, in December 1944 about 30 partisan units were active in Alytus county alone. Across Lithuania some 30,000 men were fighting with weapons. The units formed on their own, and their commanders were looking for a higher command that did not yet exist.

J. Vitkus came to Dzūkija not to hide but to unite. On 4 April 1945 a gathering of the Kabeliai fighters was called on his initiative. The unit commander Bijūnas met him and invited him to take command. At first the men called him “Old Man” and “Father”; later he chose the code name Kazimieraitis, linking it with St Casimir. In May, with several unit commanders, he set up the staff of the Dzūkai Group.

In May an amnesty was announced. Some of the men thought they could go home. Kazimieraitis did not forbid them to legalise: he understood that a unit cannot be held together by force. The NKVD never let those who came out out of its sight: all were interrogated, and some were killed.

On 17 June 1945 NKVD troops searched Kabeliai and detained Kazimieraitis. They told him to unwrap his bandaged head and show the wound, checked his papers and let him go. That same day the partisan camp was attacked and Bijūnas was killed. Kazimieraitis was not in the camp at the time. The next day he left legal life for good and never returned to Kabeliai.

He drafted the oath and the disciplinary regulations. He banned drunkenness, robbery and using the partisan name for personal gain. He ordered friendly relations with the population, making do with what people gave, and avoiding any cruelty. He also urged unarmed resistance: not to vote, not to collaborate, to sabotage.

In early July Kazimieraitis returned to the Merkys camp via Nedzingė. There he happened to meet Daktaras, deputy to Vanagas, the partisan commander of the Merkinė area, and arranged to meet Vanagas himself on 1 August.

“Before I even saw the man I recognised his voice and realised it was the former War School lecturer, Lieutenant Colonel Vitkus, who had taught us engineering.”Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas, “Daugel krito sūnų” (Many Sons Have Fallen)

Vanagas immediately agreed to join the Dzūkai Group and became Kazimieraitis’s closest comrade-in-arms. By summer 1945 Kazimieraitis had brought together about half of the Dzūkija partisans. Negotiations with Captain Dominykas Jėčys-Ąžuolis’s Dzūkai Brigade took the longest.

In November 1945 he founded the “A” District. On 10 November, meeting a liaison of the LLA supreme staff in Alytus, he agreed to submit to the LLA command and to lead a district covering the counties of Alytus, Trakai, Eišiškės and Ašmena. That same month Jonas Deksnys arrived from the West. This was the partisans’ first link with the West. Deksnys promised to send officers, and Kazimieraitis was already choosing landing sites for parachutists.

Listening through headphones to French and German radio news from London and Hamburg, he wrote it down and passed it to Vanagas. Vanagas retyped it on a typewriter, and so the newspaper “Laisvės varpas” came into being, with up to a thousand copies per issue. Stencils were scarce, so Kazimieraitis usually did the copying himself.

The bunks were cramped for four men; light came from a wick in pork fat. Lack of air was the worst torment. You could recognise partisans by their yellowed skin and bluish shadows under the eyes.

“The lack of oxygen especially tormented Kazimieraitis, so we had to open the hatch more often; later we bored a tiny hole from inside, but it helped little.”Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas

Local people helped the partisans survive: they let them wash, fed them, washed and mended their clothes and warned them of troop movements. There were agents among them too. Once the sole of Kazimieraitis’s boot came off. The liaison Juozas Jakavonis-Tigras took it to the village shoemaker, who, as it turned out only many years later, was an agent who had been briefed on what boots Kazimieraitis wore.

He did not go home for Christmas. The staff spent Christmas Eve with the Krušas family in a neighbouring village:

“We sang three Christmas carols and then spent the whole evening singing partisan and folk songs. We parted only at one in the morning, after singing the Lithuanian anthem.”Dzūkai Group staff diary (LT), 24 December 1945

On Christmas Day, when the others went to visit acquaintances, Kazimieraitis stayed alone in the hideout and wrote “Mobilisation Instructions for Lithuanian Partisans”: what to do when war broke out and Lithuania could restore its army.

In January 1946 troops attacked the Skroblus headquarters. His closest aide Ėglis was killed, and the soldiers found and seized the Dzūkai Group staff diary. Kazimieraitis was at Vanagas’s headquarters in Kasčiūnai at the time. Once, during an NKVD search, he and Vanagas hid in the bunker until the air began to run out. The lamp was going out; Kazimieraitis prayed. When the danger had passed, Tigras opened the hatch and helped him climb out.

“Such is God’s will. All that remains is to pray for the fallen and set to work with even more energy.”Kazimieraitis’s words, as recounted by A. Ramanauskas-Vanagas

Every day he recited the Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary by heart, and he taught it to Tigras. Later Tigras recited it with other prisoners in the death-row cell of the KGB cellar.

Father asked him to look after his mother and help her in every way he could. They kissed goodbye. It was their last meeting.

In March the staff moved to the Petrauskas family in the village of Snaigupė. On 23 April 1946 Kazimieraitis was elected commander of the Southern Lithuania partisan region, and on the same day the regional staff under his command issued the first political declaration of the Lithuanian partisan commanders. It proclaimed that the system of an independent Lithuania would be free and democratic. Some of its principles were later carried over into the LLKS Declaration of 16 February 1949.

In May the staff worked in the village of Jakubiškiai with Antanas Uoselis, until security officers found a straw tent with a small printing press in the forest. The staff then moved to hastily built bunkers in Žaliamiškis. Kazimieraitis never wore a uniform: he went about in civilian clothes, clean-shaven, with a pistol.

The family received his last letter in June:

“Only one thing weighs on me – longing for my dearest ones. <…> The only help I can give is prayer.”Last letter to his family, 8 June 1946

On 2 July two staff members quarrelled in the bunker. Kazimieraitis, who disliked quarrels, climbed up to the surface. At about 2 p.m. he was spotted by a group of nine soldiers walking beside the road to Guobiniai. He returned fire with his pistol and wounded a soldier, but was severely wounded by bullets and grenade fragments. The wounded man was taken by cart to Kostas Bulavas’s farmstead in Guobiniai. He died there at about 8 p.m.

He was in civilian clothes, so at first they thought an ordinary partisan had been killed. In his pockets they found a prayer book, documents, photographs and a notebook with entries in French. A villager who wrote in French aroused suspicion. In Leipalingis the body was dug up and shown to people who had known him. That is how his identity was established. He was buried by the “stribai” headquarters at Dzūkų g. 15, and lay there for 76 years.

On 23 July 1946 a stranger brought the family a note written in pencil and signed “Pergalė”. It reported the death of Juozas Vitkus but did not say where.

Sergei Kruglov, the USSR Minister of Internal Affairs, reported his death in writing to Stalin, Molotov, Beria and Zhdanov.