Adolfas was assigned to a machine, I am working in the assembly department. I am turning the screws, I am cleaning, rubbing, oily to my ears. Good they gave us special work clothes and good heavy factory shoes.

Only the foreman and special technicians are German. All workers — a hundred amd some — are from prisoner of war camps. Italians, Russians, French, Yugoslavs, Ukrainians, Poles. We are the only Lithuanians.

[...]

Whatever little time we have now, we spend on languages.

Spent a few days in Tŭbingen. I stayed at the Gastof zur Linde.

Snooping through the bookshops. Rich in religion and philosophy. No money to buy any. I was amazed, how much one can get from a book, just by holding it in your hands, looking at a page here, a page there. There are many ways of absorbing a book.

I tried to enlist in the Philosophy/Theology department. Failed. They told me to come back in two weeks, the head of the faculty was out of town, it's he ho makes all the decisions.

Visited Heidelberg, Stuttgart. On foot.

Walked through the villages, orchards, dusty little roads. Slept in the triple-soft beds in small Bavarian villages, in rooms smelling of two centuries.

A letter to Stasys Bŭdavas.

We would like to come to the United States and try to live there for a while. Is it possible to arrange some kind of working papers that would allow us to do that? For two not very practical but obstinate young men? As far as work goes — we can do anything, despite our firm belief that in America the only honest way of living for a poet is the life of a bum.

In short: WE ARE LOOKING FOR WORK.

Cursed be the work! That is, what is meant by work today. Consciously and of our own free will we pledge to become HORSES! What will happen a year later after we get enough of it — what will happen then, we cannot promise you anything...

When I just think, how everybody's working in offices and factories, so busily — in those insane asylums — I fall into a green panic, as Mikšys would say. At the same time I am aware that having been at it for so long humanity doesn't know how to turn back; that humanity cannot be cured of that disease without surgery. Right now, civilization is on the "critical list". It's creeping forward through the narrow holes of its own industriousness and it cannot turn around — all it can do is to continue creeping until the noose begins to tighten...

[...]

It was exactly 3 PM. The ship exuded three hoarse hoots from its three fat chimneys. A couple of people, not more, waved from the shore. The harbor, the pier was completely empty. No, nobody is here to see us out...Nobody will really miss us here. Just a few harbor workers, in their blue overalls, faded from too many washings, stood on the shore as the ship, at first very slowly, gradually faster and faster began tearing itself from shore, from Europe.

There were tears in a few eyes, while I could read some melancholic thoughts in others. But mostly the eyes were still unbelieving, incredulous, even shocked by the fact they were really on board, and the ship was moving, moving towards the sea — the open sea — and that soon they would no longer be in Europe. Yes, finally the war is over...

But nobody took it as dramatically as I am describing here. A D.P. [displaced person] has become used to arrivals and departures, to settling down then moving on again. Members of one family, workers in the same slave factory, friends from living out years in the same room... You attach youself only to break away again, to part, each bound for a different direction in the wide world. Friendships, words, children, kisses — abandoning all to oblivion or to memory. There is no time even to remember it all... There are always new places and new people and new miseries.

"I'll write you, you wait for my letters, wait for my postcards, soon — as soon as I arrive – as soon as I settle down...".

They don't know that they'll never really settle down. No, never. Some part of them will never be really there, a part of each of them will stay on in the old country never allowing them to really settle down elsewhere, to really grow roots. You'll keep moving, brother, you'll keep moving and running and you'll die with homesickness in your eyes.

[...]

"But I don't like any of the professions."

"It's not important, to like it. The profession will make life easier."

"My life is easy and I have no profession. My needs are zero. I work for a month, and then I live three months without any work, as long as the money lasts."

"You'll end up a bum."

"If, according to you, a bum is a man who is content living on a minimum, with a minimum of property, minimum of exploitation of others, and minimum of exploitation of this planet — then I am a minimalist and the bums are my true friends."