My homeland under threat, I saw my own situation: do I fight on or compromise in my own life?

Is this what psychologists call “vicarious identification,” I ask myself. “Am I trying to convey worlds of meaning through the precise details of my own past, of my family’s Lithuanian ancestry?”

Fate isn’t a straight line, it goes off like branches on a big tree. So, which branch do you pick? Among those branches is the story of my own struggles, sorrows and choices. None of the choices is perfect, they’re all just branches. All the way to the end. Perhaps like the oft-quoted soliloquy from Shakespeare’s Richard III, my personal winter of discontent has at its root my own place in history — the resilience of Lithuania and my family tree.

Shortly after the start of the Second World War in September 1939, Lithuania had been divided into two spheres of influence as the result of a pact between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. But by 1940, the Soviets annexed the entire country, and the repression of citizens began, starting in the capital of Vilnius. Up to 30,000 were sent to the infamous Soviet gulags.

My grandparents Feliksas and Salomeja and their children Danute and my mother Ramute lived in the village of Kybartai, in the west of Lithuania, which bordered East Prussia (today the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad). As a lawyer and academic, my grandfather would have known that his and his own family’s arrest was surely imminent.

On June 22, 1941, Operation Barbarossa began, Hitler’s surprise attack on Russia. It was my mother’s 12th birthday. Every year, almost without fail, she would mention “the day the Nazis invaded’ as if it were a brass plate attached to the doorway of her inner pathos, her true being. Little snippets would follow, about tanks and soldiers going by her window. Perhaps for many Ukrainian children, Feb. 24, 2022, will have the same, searing impact on their souls.

Ramute Verikaitis died in 2019 just short of her 90th birthday, her last years ravaged by dementia. Going through her things in the house I grew up in, the story of her life, my life, began to unfold through documents and pictures, some of which I had never seen before.

For my mother and her family, four years of forced labour in German factories was followed by another three in American refugee camps when the war ended.

I found her high school diploma from the displaced persons (DP) camp in Wiesbaden, Germany. A photo of the Nea Hellas, the Greek vessel they took from Genoa in Italy en route to New York, where they would start a new life.

Onboard, Ramute met a dashing young fellow Lithuanian named Vaclovas. They made a decision to get off the ship in Halifax at Pier 21 and made their way to Toronto instead of New York. My father eventually graduated from the Faculty of Music at the University of Toronto, to begin a promising career as a singer. As a child, I remember watching him on stage at the old O’Keefe Centre, in operas like “Madama Butterfly” and “Tosca,” and musicals like “HMS Pinafore” and “South Pacific.” But it was in the Lithuanian community that he was a star.

“My own father met your father in the German DP camps and formed a strong friendship that lasted throughout their new life in Canada,” I was told by Danguole Breen, director and archivist at the Lithuanian Museum and Archives in Toronto.

“Within the Lithuanian-Canadian community, he was a pivotal figure in the musical sphere,” she added. “There was hardly any cultural event without his involvement as organizer, musical director and performer. He remained true to his Lithuanian heritage for his entire life.” My father died from a heart attack at his 65th birthday celebration, not in Toronto, but in Vilnius.

This year, I too will turn 65, and it also marks 10 years since I wrote and directed my short film “How Can A Warm Man Understand A Cold Man?” for TVOntario, as part of the Why Poverty? initiative, a global cross-media event, using films to get people talking about poverty. Mine was to be the story of my fall.

I went from a successful career as a television producer, who had travelled and worked in over 40 countries before age 35, to living in a rent-geared-to-income unit in downtown Toronto. For this film, there was a screening at Toronto’s Hot Docs cinema, and a publicity tour that included radio, television and print interviews.

Things were looking up for me. I began writing regularly for the Huffington Post and did a feature article for the Daily Beast on the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. I tried my hand at creating a TV drama series. There were pitch meetings with all the major networks in Canada, all to no avail. It’s a hard road from survival to success. But I never stopped trying to find good and meaningful work; the rejections failed to stultify my hopes. But the realities were obvious; it’s a tough business at the best of times, even with the support of good people.

During this period, my health began to deteriorate. Four heart surgeries, a hip replacement, two knee surgeries, and a ruptured Achilles tendon that is inoperable. Worst of all is the diagnosis of CIDP (Chronic Inflammatory Demyelinating Polyneuropathy) that leaves my hands and feet numb, and on the worst days, a level of pain that reaches past anything I have ever felt. My treatment involves blood plasma transfusions twice weekly. I battle through it all and survive on a provincial disability fund that leaves me well below the poverty line.

Perhaps the greatest pain is being estranged from my three daughters, but I believe there will come a time when we get to talk again.

That’s my situation, in health, family and material circumstances. And something has happened, something vital, as I watch and read about the conflict in Ukraine. It affects everyone on the planet to some degree. We are somewhat more isolated here in Canada, so my thoughts have turned vividly and emotionally to Lithuania.

The tiny country of three million people isn’t a major part of the news coverage, but it is uppermost in my heart and soul, always there in the subtext. Vulnerable, like other countries nearby to Russia; vulnerable like me.

Lithuania, a country whose post-Cold War identity has revolved around the fight against communism and authoritarianism, has rarely shied from using its freedom to criticize. Darius Skusevicius, Lithuanian ambassador to Canada, told me on a Zoom call, “Lithuania is at the centre of what is happening.

“If you investigate regional dynamics and politics, where do we have the biggest concentration of Russian opposition and civil society actors? In Vilnius. Where do we have most of civil society and opposition leaders of Belarus? In Vilnius. Who is the most vocal on the sanctions and wholeheartedly supporting Ukraine? It’s been Vilnius and Lithuania.”

My feelings of identification with Lithuania are matched by identification felt by Lithuania with Ukraine. Lithuania’s military and public preparations for an all-out conflict with the forces of the Russian Federation are real.

Laurynas Kasciunas, the chairman of the National Defence and Security Committee of the Parliament of Lithuania, told me: “I feel sometimes that if you look from a distance, it looks like we’re braver and stronger, that we have this ‘Braveheart’ ideal. But of course, you know we should be realistic — it’s not the whole society. We also have some people who say let’s negotiate, do not go to war, but that’s democracy. But if you want peace, prepare for war.”

Listening to him, I saw my own situation; do I fight on or compromise in my own life?

Lithuania was the first state to support Ukraine. Thousands of Lithuanians have opened their homes to Ukrainian refugees. Ukrainian flags are flying everywhere in Lithuania, and the slogan “be as brave as Ukraine” is one of the most popular slogans in Vilnius.

For some observers, Lithuania may appear to be bellicose, a yapping small dog of a country in geopolitics. For me, Lithuania is at the core of my essence. Perhaps I might find my answers to questions about my own life in the land of my ancestors, in visiting the town where they were born, in praying at my father’s grave. But my financial situation precludes me from doing that.

I am Canadian, I am Lithuanian. Fate has brought me here, to a feeling that my soul, my essence will not be destroyed, as Lithuania will surely not be destroyed. It is vulnerable, as I am, but I take strength from that.

Vaclovas (Vac) Verikaitis has produced television sports around the world for 30 years including the World Cup of Soccer, Olympics and Formula One. He is currently writing on Baltic national security affairs and a “Live from the Kaliningrad border” podcast. He is hoping to move to Lithuania full time.