Underground: A Novel [Paperback]

"Underground" follows the story of a student-turned-partisan in Soviet occupied Lithuania that will please both the average reader and historian alike. The average reader will be taken in by a narrative that is compelling without being predictable, while the historian will appreciate reading about someone who was more than just a statistic, an anonymous number on the list of those lost in this "secret" war. Recommended.

This book was a gift from a friend who thought of my Lithuanian heritage. I found the writing brilliant in its simplicity and the content profoundly moving! I did not know a lot of what was really going on in the old country as my parents moved to Canada as teenagers. Now I do! Thank you for sharing this with the world!

This is not the first novel I have read written by this author. On 25 August 2009 I wrote a review of Buying on Time for [...]. I described that book as being a "Heartwarming story of a refugee child's growing up in Canada." Indeed it was. I was impressed then by the author's style but never so much as by Underground: A Novel which I consider an amazing book.

In the Acknowledgments of this book the author states the novel itself could not have been written if not for the collapse of the Soviet Union and the independence of Lithuania in 1991. He admits that "these events opened up various archives and personal memoirs that led to the publication of a large number of histories about the partisan resistance to the second Soviet occupation in 1944. The story of the partisan resistance not only in Lithuania but also in Estonia, Latvia, Ukraine and Poland remains largely unknown in the West....Before 1991, few of the details or the partisan resistance were known beyond the stories told in Juozas Luksa's PARTIZANAI first published in 1950 and now available on [...] as Forest Brothers: The Account of an Anti-Soviet Lithuanian Freedom Fighter, 1944-1948 when Luksa came out to the West, fell in love and married, and then returned to Lithuania, where he was betrayed and shot in ambush." The author admits to having used the outline of the Luksa story for Underground: A Novel.

In this novel the author tells the love story of Lukas and Elena, two members of the underground Lithuanian resistance movement which itself began in the mid 1940's and did not end until about 1953--nine years after Lithuania's second occupation. The characters and the plot line are fictional, of course, but the story of the Lithuanian partisans is not and the author takes this opportunity to educate the public about their existance. The adult child of Lithuanian refugees, myself, I found what I learned here to be the most interesting. For instance early in the novel the author describes how the lead character (Lukas) and his brother, Vincentas, "swore their oaths...promising to obey all orders not to desert and to fight until the Reds had been chased out of the country,,,,One hundred and fifty men and two women stood at attention, saluted them and then sang the national anthem as if they were living in a free state." This is the point in the novel where Lukas first meets Elena with whom he later falls in love. It also represents the time when the partisan reistance in Lithuania was strongest "with as many as thirty thousand active participants and many more supporters. By the early fifties, numbers were down to a couple of thousand, and these were being slowly exterminated."

This is a sad story but one that needed to be written. I cannot imagine what partisans like Lukas and Elena felt when they finally realized that no one was coming to help them rid thier country of the Soviets. As the author so skillfully writes: "The French and English had gone to war over Poland..surely the next to be liberated after Poland should be Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania which thought of themselves as part of the European family....No one else did. The English had decided to give the three Baltic countries to the Soviets if they were ever asked but the Reds never bothered. They believed they didn't need to....Roosevelt told Stalin he could keep the Baltics as long as he was discreet....The war had ended for Westerners in Europe on May 8, 1945, after which Germans and Americans, English and French all laid down their arms and began the hard road to peace, the rebuilding of cities, the denazification that would clear away the old enemies...But in the East no such end came. Instead of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, in Ukraine and Belarussia and parts of Poland the war went underground. For awhile the partisans fought pitched battles from fixed positions, but now that Germany was defeated the Reds could turn and devote their strength to making the new lands confrom to their plans."

This is an excellent book I am so happy my maternal aunt in Toronto told me about. As I was reading it, I was thinking "You know this would have the makings of a good movie--in the same vein as the 1965 film Doctor Zhivago which, as I recall, begins with the daughter of two hapless lovers during the Russian Revolution of 1917 being told about her past. The film then takes the opportunity to describe the impact historical events of the day left on the people who were living them at the time. At the end of Underground: A Novel, many years later, two young men find out that they are indeed half-brothers, offspring of the Lithuanian partisan restistance fighter, Lukas Petronis. A film based on this book would not only "entertain" with a powerful love story but could also educate them about a very important chapter of history that should never be forgotten. I STROHGLY recommend this book!