Juozas Urbsys; Foreign Minister in Prewar Lithuania

Juozas Urbsys, 95, the last foreign minister of prewar independent Lithuania before it was absorbed into the Soviet Union in 1940. He was the first Lithuanian to be informed by Kremlin leader Josef Stalin that his country would cease to exist. A secret pact in 1939 between Moscow and Nazi Germany took Lithuania in the Soviet sphere. Urbsys was arrested in July, 1940, shortly before Lithuania was incorporated into the Soviet Union. He subsequently spent 13 years in prisons in Siberia, 11 of them in solitary confinement, before returning to Lithuania in the mid-1950s. His memoirs, recounting the diplomatic maneuvering between his government and Stalin in early 1940, were published three years ago and were an instant bestseller. In Kaunas, Lithuania, on Wednesday.