Chicago is the second-biggest Lithuanian city

ONE of the artefacts on display at the Lithuanian World Centre, a vast community centre on more than 18 acres of land in Lemont, a leafy village on the outskirts of Chicago, is a wooden sculpture of Hitler and Stalin scalping a kneeling man. The man is Lithuania. The country suffered under Soviet, Nazi and again Soviet occupations for 50 years, and before that under tsarist rule. “We used to be the largest country in Europe and then we just disappeared from the map,” says Marijus Gudynas of the Lithuanian Foreign Office, in Vilnius. These traumas have left 1.3m Lithuanians (from a country of barely 3m) living abroad. Chicago is their undisputed capital. Around 100,000 residents still call themselves Lithuanian, though they are often third- or even fourth-generation immigrants. Valdas Adamkus, twice president of newly independent Lithuania, went back after living in Chicago for decades.

Lithuanian immigrants came to Chicago in three waves. At the turn of the 20th century thousands of Litvaks (Lithuanian Jews) fled the pogroms under Russian rule, while mostly blue-collar workers came for jobs in the stockyards. (The main character in “The Jungle”, Upton Sinclair’s portrait of the horrific working conditions in Chicago’s slaughterhouses, is Jurgis Rudkus, a Lithuanian immigrant.) After the second world war a second wave of refugees fleeing the Soviet occupation arrived via displaced-person (DP) camps in western Europe. And, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, a third wave of immigrants were drawn to Chicago because their compatriots sponsored them to come.