Mixed WWII anniversary emotions for Baltic States

To understand why the festivities in Moscow to mark the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II are less than universally appreciated, consider the story of Irena Koncius.

She is 79 now, living quietly in Massachusetts.

But she will never forget the events of those years, experienced as a teenager in Lithuania's old capital of Kaunas - the Soviet occupation of her country in 1940, then the terrible night of June 15, 1941, when Soviet trucks arrived to collect thousands of Lithuanians (including much of her own family) for deportation to Siberia, and how her father hid in the woods to escape them.

A week later, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union and German occupiers soon arrived in Lithuania. Then came Stalingrad and in 1944 Soviet Armies were again at the gates of Kaunas.

Irena and her parents fled westward towards Germany, their possessions loaded on to a horse-drawn wagon built by her father. Declared a displaced person at war's end, she finally arrived in the US in 1949.

By then, of course, Lithuania and the other once independent Baltic states of Estonia and Latvia had vanished from the map of Europe, "voluntarily" subsumed into Stalin's Soviet Union.

On Monday, George W. Bush will attend the commemorations but Valdas Adamkus, the President of Lithuania, will not go, nor his Estonian counterpart, Arnold Ruutel.

And for many leaders of former Soviet satellite countries behind the old Iron Curtain who will attend, the occasion will be tinged with bitter memories, of how liberation from one brutal foreign power was followed by enforced subservience to another.

For Moscow, the "Great Patriotic War" is an utterly glorious moment of Russian history. Irena Koncius for one, however, begs to differ.

"It's absolutely right that the Lithuanian President is not going to Moscow. It's unthinkable."

What she didn't know when she fled, of course, was the secret protocol added to the German-Soviet non-aggression pact of 1939, in which Hitler and Stalin carved up Poland and the Baltic states between them.

For Lithuania, the least to be expected next week would be some acknowledgment and apology from Vladimir Putin for the cynical bargain of 1939.

- INDEPENDENT