Lithuanians Share Their Grief During Protest in Southland

Hundreds of protesters of Lithuanian heritage gathered Sunday at a Silver Lake church to worry. Wearing black ribbons of mourning for the 13 killed Saturday by Soviet troops and lapel pins in the colors of the national flag, they rallied on the front steps of St. Casimir’s, a Lithuanian Roman Catholic parish.

Luana Masiulis was there, but her thoughts were elsewhere. The last she had heard, her 18-year-old brother, Laimonas, was helping to protect the building housing the Lithuanian Supreme Council, the republic’s Parliament. He had enlisted in the republic’s independent police and hid with other cadets in the forest Thursday night to avoid being conscripted into the Soviet army. The next morning, nationalists spirited the cadets to the Supreme Council.

He called his parents that night to say goodby, just in case. “They have no guns, nothing,” his sister said through a translator. “The only thing they have is bulletproof vests.”

Albina Baskauskas was consumed by fright. “I’m cry. I no can sleep. I pray,” said Baskauskas in broken English. Her 48-year-old daughter, Viola, is a Cal State Northridge anthropologist who took a year off to teach in newly reopened Vytautas Magnus University in Lithuania. Viola’s husband, Stephen Anaya, is a Santa Monica College art professor who is teaching in Vilnius. Their two children also are there. They last phoned Christmas Day.

Stasys Kasauskas, a Supreme Council deputy on the Foreign Affairs Committee, fretted about visiting the United States while Vilnius was occupied.

“Finally, the mask fell off the face of the Nobel (Peace) Prize winner,” he said, referring to President Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

He said it was no coincidence that the army arrived while the world’s attention was focused on the Persian Gulf. “A burglar always waits until it gets dark before he makes his move.”