14/06/2026
On this day of Mourning and Hope, commemorating the first Soviet mass deportations of Lithuanians, I’m sharing some storyboards from my upcoming book about my great grandmother Eugenija.
In 1951, at 22 years old she met Lithuanian resistants for the first time. Among them, Juozas Lukša “Daumantas” who had just come back from France’s intelligence trainings. She got yelled at for wearing a soviet sports pin from school and for a marxist book in her shelf, but she made it clear what her stance was and soon enough they were bonding over poetry. This encounter lead Eugenija’s family to
For the last months I’ve been reading Eugenija’s journals and browsing KGB and national deportation archives trying to put together the pieces of puzzle of her story in my head (and on paper). The complexity of navigating and surviving amid historical madness and terror as a young woman would be impossible to fit in a caption, but it is something I hope to be able convey - or at least attempt to explore - in my book.
As I am learning to bring Eugenija’s story live with images and words, I grieve the recent passing of the major comic author Marjane Satrapi. Her graphic novel Persepolis, one of the first of its kind, blending the intimate and the Historical, family and nation, grief and exile, brings the same sense nuance and ambiguity, and has greatly inspired me in the process.
