Nijole Sadunaite

In her memoirs, Nijole recalled how on a September morning in 1970, she sat in a courtroom in Luthuania, not as one accused, but for a priest friend who was being tried for the crime of teaching religion to children. Along with many of the priest’s parishioners, Nijole volunteered to say that they had themselves taught the children, and Father only tested the children’s knowledge.

One of Nijole’s "crimes" was the "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda" she spread through a paper, The Chronicle, which she devoted to exposing the abuses in her country. The Free World took little notice of these abuses, but her writings showed a heroic witness to the faith in the Twentieth Century. Thousands of Lithuanian Catholics endured persecution and martyrdom, and showed great poise and eloquence under repression. In late 1947, Lithuanian Catholics addressed a letter to Pope Pius XII; it was smuggled out of the country and delivered to Rome. The letter detailed massive atrocities by the occupying Soviets. "In the month of June, 1941, in three days, the Soviets arrested 40,000 Lithuanian men, women, children, aged persons, and deported them on cattle cars to Siberia. We have seen with our own eyes the corpses thrown alongside the roads. They have destroyed our cities and our villages; they have taken our lands, our houses, our liberty."

One of the specific abuses was the pressure to create a national church severed from Rome. To this end, priests, bishops, and dedicated laity were especially targeted for torture and death. Schools, churches, hospitals, seminaries, and charitable works were suppressed.

During most of the seventies, Nijole was in a concentration camp but she was eventually sent into exile in Siberia in 1977. Here she and her companions were considered murderers and dangerous criminals and a threat to the Soviet system. Many died during the harsh conditions of forced labor camps, or were weakened beyond recovery by years of spoiled food, overwork, and mistreatment. At 40, Nijole suffered a heart attack. Fear, overwork, and mistreatment had taken their toll. Next she was sent to cut timber with the men. She landed as a cleaning lady in a school and seemingly recovered her health. Next she worked as a nurse in a hospital. She moved from this to a dairy farm and worked in temperatures around 50 degrees below zero.

Nijole was freed in July of 1980. During the next few years she lived as a virtual fugitive, working as a cleaning lady in a church but continuing to write for the Chronicle. She endeavored to record the many cases of violence, especially aimed at priests. Somehow she eluded captivity. "It was by the grace of God," she said, and she lived to tell her story and the story of her suffering people.