Janina Mažeikaitė

Janina, who comes from Panevėžys but has lived in Kaunas for more than sixty years, remembers participating in the partisan movement, forging identity documents, her first visits to Kaunas to see her brother imprisoned by the NKVD, the fate of her relatives who were deported to Siberia, and the formation of her young family in Vilijampolė and Žaliakalnis... "I didn't have any documents. My uncle found out that students were coming from Kaunas to forge passports. He taught me how to do it, and I stole a passport from the seamstress who was teaching me to sew. We went to the forest at night. We handed over the passport. They asked me what year I wanted to be born and what my surname was. I wrote down the surname of the seamstress's family. Then they told us to leave. We sat in a circle with my uncle and waited, dozing. At dawn, they called us and gave us back the passport.“---”My brother was arrested and imprisoned in Kaunas, but I already had a passport and was able to take him a parcel. I would travel to Kaunas in a truck that had been stopped on the highway. I would stay in Šančiai, on Mažeikių Street, with our neighbors' neighbors. They were struggling and were afraid to go with me to the prison. I would go alone—I was brave and already had a different last name."---"I used to tie a scarf around my head—someone told me that no one would recognize me that way. Once, with the scarf on, I was sitting at the bus station in Kaunas. A young man in baggy pants and long boots came up to me. He said, 'I want your passport. I said, ‘Here you go.’ He took my passport, and I got scared: I didn't know how the passport had been made, or if anything was missing. I thought, ‘Whatever will be, will be. If they arrest me, they arrest me.’ He looked at it, gave me back my passport and just asked, “Why are you wearing a scarf?” "In Vilijampolė, half of our house was behind a pharmacy, on the corner of Panerių and Jurbarko streets. We moved from Vilijampolė to Žaliakalnis in the fall. The Jew from whom we bought this farmstead didn't sell it to anyone else, he kept it for us, even though there were many people returning from Russia who wanted to buy it. It was like heaven here compared to Vilijampolė. There, there was a toilet in the yard, a path to walk through and nothing else, not a single tree, and here – such a beautiful place, a garden full of apples.“---”In the old town, in the square near the Castle, closer to the Vilijampolė Bridge, he opened a bathhouse and looked for specialists. I started working there. I worked with Jews – there were many of them, both male and female hairdressers. There were three female hairdressers and two manicurists. My family had just returned from Siberia at that time, my sister with her child and my parents. My sister wanted to work as a male hairdresser. We who worked at the bathhouse were like a family, so I asked them to take her on. I really liked Laisvės Alėja, Ąžuolynas, where there were swings. I also liked the Sports Hall, we used to go to concerts. The five of us would go and sit on half a bench, and once we got a warning. My husband brought ice cream and shared it between the five of us, and one of them turned around and said, “What a family!”---"Finally, a friend who helped me become a hairdresser invited me to work at the Muralio hair salon. It was in the Pieno Centras building, on the second floor. I saw how they built Merkūrijus – I worked in the tenth chair, right by the window. The Muralio hair salon was high-class: white towels, white smocks, disinfectants on the table, we disinfected after every combing, there was no other way..."- - -Janina Mažeikaitė-IlekienėJanina was born in the summer of 1928 in the Panevėžys district, Krekenava parish, Užliaušių village, where her parents had settled after returning from emigration in the US. There were nine children in the family. When Lithuania was occupied by the Soviet Union, Janina's brothers refused to obey the general conscription into the Red Army and joined the partisan resistance. Her parents, brother, and sister were deported to Siberia in 1948, but Janina, thanks to a lucky break, stayed in Lithuania and worked with members of the resistance movement. Later, when the thaw began, she had already started a family and traveled to Siberia to visit her relatives.During her first visits to Kaunas, despite her fear and uncertainty, Janina was so enchanted by the city that she convinced her husband to settle there. In 1954, the family settled in Vilijampolė, and in 1960 they bought a farmstead in Žaliakalnis, where she still lives today.

Interview date: 2019-03-07