The Nazis didn't kill the Stutthof prisoners immediately, but turned them into floundering shadows, klìpatas. His 'team' does not resemble living people, but a moving crowd of ghosts. In the selection given below, the repressed voice of the humanist Sruoga (a voice which frequently recurs in this book) breaks through when he sees the Stutthof camp's 'team of klipatas.' Sruoga had invented the new word klìpata to denote the lame and crippled people who could hardly move, the physically injured and morally broken prisoners, out of whom the desire to live had been beaten and who no longer wished to resist death. Sruoga's health never recovered after Stutthof, and he died in 1947. It is entitled 'Forest of the Gods,' after the name of the swampy place in which the Stutthof concentration camp had been built. The book was not published until about a decade later, when Europe had more or less had its fill of this kind of memoir. But the book was received with hostility by the Soviet system because of its subtle irony, which did not allow a note of sentimentality to thrust its way through in the presence of the brutality and meaninglessness of death. Unlike many other works of this genre, here an attempt is made to conceal fragile human nature under external irony, laughter through tears, a screen for what cannot be completely told. In it the process of dehumanization, which the totalitarian systems perpetrated, is exposed from within. This is one of the first memoirs in Europe about the Nazi concentration camps.

The cruelties of Soviet occupation, the trains with Lithuanians exiled to Siberia had forced Sruoga to send them a warning: 'Don't return home.' He never saw them again.Īfter the war, Sruoga wrote in a few months a book about the Stutthof concentration camp called Dievų̃ mìškas 'Forest of the gods'. His wife, an historian, and his daughter, fleeing from Soviet occupation, had gone west as had thousands of other Lithuanian scholars, artists and writers. But still another tragedy awaited him on his return to Lithuania in 1945.

In Stutthof it fell to his lot to experience the horror of the Nazi system of violence, and several times he narrowly escaped death. He considered totalitarianism the greatest enemy of mankind. Among these was Balys Sruoga, a writer, specialist in literature, and a professor at Vytautas the Great and Vilnius universities. In revenge, in March of 1943 they arrested a group of Lithuanian intellectuals and sent them to the Stuthoff concentration camp. In the summer of 1941 Nazi Germany occupied Lithuania, but the Nazis were unable to form Lithuanian legions for their army. Linguistics Research Center Social Mediaįor comments and inquiries, or to report issues, please contact the Web Master at Menuīaltic Online Lesson 2: Lithuanian Virginija Vasiliauskiene and Jonathan Slocum.

Dievų miškas by Balys Sruoga