On June 14, 1941, at night, a mass forceful deportation of Lithuanian citizens to the most severe USSR areas started. Deportations aimed at changing social and national composition of citizens and suppress resistance to the occupation regime. In the echelon formation places, at train stations, families were divided into two groups: ‘Group A’ consisted of ‘heads of family’,’ and ‘Group B’ – of ‘family members’,’ mothers, children, and grandparents. People from ‘Group A’ were carried by convoy to forced labour camps and prisoner-of-war camps, and people from ‘Group B’ – to places of exile. In total, more than 17,000 people were deported from Lithuania during the four-day deportations.

The exhibition “(Un)filled Void” conveys the drama of separation experienced by families after the repressions that occurred in June 1941. The members of the most socially vulnerable group of society (women, children, grandparents) that are captured in photographs from exile, metaphorically discover a connection with the breadwinner (husband, father, son) in daily life alongside the accompanying silhouettes of memory. The poems framed in the silhouette of a young man are symbolically presented as an expression of the emotional response. Their author, Lithuanian officer Alfonsas Kazlauskas, was arrested and separated from his wife, two daughters and mother on June 14, 1941. The most sensitive experiences of a man with a robust spirit in loneliness are strongly felt in the verses: longing for family and love, preserving hope and determination, discovering the meaning of existence, feeling the support of the loved ones, giving the new meanings to the sense of nature. The apple orchard becomes an idyllic, cosy and a safe allusion to the homeland that was not available at the time. The branches make an impression of a patronizing veil wrapping the images of people marked by a brutal regime and thoughts frozen in ink. They came back, they won, they stayed alive in our memory…

Alfonsas Kazlauskas (1904–1984)

Head of the family, Lithuanian officer, political prisoner.

In 1926, he graduated from the Military School and was awarded the rank of lieutenant in artillery. In 1932, he graduated from the course of Vytautas Magnus Officers’ Artillery Department. He became a captain in 1934. In early 1940’s he was promoted and became a major. Upon the liquidation of the Lithuanian Armed Forces on October 3, 1940, he was appointed Chief of Staff of the Separate Zenith Artillery Division of the 29th Rifle Territorial Corps of the Red Army. On June 14, 1941, he was arrested and deported to the Norilsk forced labour camp (Krasnoyarsk Krai). On 5th of September, 1942, he was sentenced by the USSR NKVD Special Meeting to eight years. He was released from the forced labour camp in 1947 and returned to Lithuania to his family.

The exhibition uses material from the collections of Kaunas Ninth Fort Museum.