The National Library of Lithuania has published the memoirs of Gabrielius Žemkalnis (1929–2017) Lithuanians in Gestapo Prisons (compiled by Dalia Cidzikaitė). According to the historian Dr. Ilona Strumickienė, the book takes the reader back to the Nazi German occupation, revealing the experiences of Lithuanian resistance fighters and opening yet another page of suffering, hope, strength, solidarity and ingenuity in Lithuanian history.
The author of the memoirs, a fifteen-year-old student at Kaunas Aušra Boys’ Gymnasium, was arrested and imprisoned first in Kaunas, Lithuania, then in Germany from 1944 to 1945. The memoirs, written in 1944, reflect in detail the repressive actions of the Nazi German occupation authorities against the Lithuanian resistance fighters—twenty-seven Lithuanians arrested by the Gestapo, brutally interrogated and imprisoned in inhuman conditions.
Žemkalnis joined the ranks of the Lithuanian resistance fighters with fellow high school students and published and distributed the underground newspaper Jaunime budėk! He was arrested on May 13, 1944, and imprisoned until April 13, 1945. After the war, Žemkalnis emigrated to Australia, where he actively participated in local Lithuanian activities. Since 1998, he lived in Lithuania, serving as representative of the World Lithuanian Community in Lithuania (1998–2009), and later as Chairman of the WLC Board (2003–2006). In 2009, Žemkalnis returned to Australia. In 2009–2012, he was a member of the Seimas of the Republic of Lithuania and the WLC Commission (representing Australia), and he served as Chairman of the Australian Lithuanian Community Board.
The book contains the transcripts of letters between Gabrielius Žemkalnis’s father, Vytautas Landsbergis-Žemkalnis, and Lithuanian political prisoners imprisoned in German prisons in Landsberg-Warthe and Bayreuth (1944–1945), as well as correspondence between Landsbergis Žemkalnis and Jadvyga Viršilienė, the mother of the first Lithuanian to die in a German prison.
Several appendices supplement the book: Adolfas Damušis’s, one of the twenty-seven Lithuanian prisoners, answers to the questions of the Court of Honor of the Lithuanian Anti Nazi Resistance Union of Former Political Prisoners, detailed information about some of the persons mentioned in memoirs, illustrations, an index of names and place names.
The publication of the book was partly financed by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Lithuania.