The Anne Frank of Lithuania: A Lecture about the Life, Poetry, and Diary of Matilda Olkinaitė (1922-1941)

This talk with Laima Vincė will present the brief creative life of the Lithuanian Jewish poet Matilda Olkinaitė who was killed in the Shoah in the summer of 1941. Matilda and her family were murdered by local collaborators in the early days of the Nazi German occupation of Lithuania. Her diary and notebook of poems survived through a series of small miracles and the perseverance of people who did not allow her voice to be lost forever.

Olkinaitė was born June 6, 1922 in Lithuania. By age nine she was publishing her poems in popular interwar children’s magazines. In the autumn of 1939, Matilda began her studies in French literature at the University in Kaunas. There she fell in love with a Lithuanian student, and the story of her first love becomes the theme of her diary. In 1940, she transferred to the Department of Humanities at Vilnius University, where Lithuania’s most famous poets and literary figures became her professors and mentors. After the Soviet Russian occupation of Lithuania in 1940, Matilda became an unpublished poet by choice.

Matilda’s poems were forgotten until 2017, when Lithuanian-American writer Laima Vincė translated her diary and poems from Lithuanian into English. Laima Vincė has published Matilda Olkinaitė’s poems in a bilingual Lithuanian and English poetry book titled The Cerulean Bird: Matilda Olkinaite . Together with editor Mindaugas Kvietkauskas, she published Matilda’s diary and poems, along with surviving photographs and documents, in the book The Unlocked Diary. Vincė’s historical fiction novel, That Unspoken Word, retells Matilda’s story, weaving in her diary excerpt and poems.

Matilda’s unique and visionary poems will be read in English translation along with excerpts from her diary (written between 1940 and 1941) and That Unspoken Word.

Laima Vincė became deeply interested in survivor narratives and memory of the Holocaust in Lithuania as a Fulbright scholar in 2007 – 2009, when she travelled around the country recording and writing down the oral histories of survivors of the Shoah, who at the time were already in their eighties and nineties. Their stories became the catalyst for her work of literary nonfiction, Journey into the Backwater of the Heart (Amazon, 2009), which was later translated into Lithuanian and published as Mūsų nepalaužė (Alma Littera, 2018). Her research revealed that it was impossible to talk about the Soviet Russian and German Nazi occupations of Lithuania and the Holocaust without delving into the ways in which the stories of survivors, bystanders, perpetrators, and their descendants are interwoven. Her research became the topic of her doctoral dissertation at Vilnius University, where she explored through the genre of memoir and life-writing intergenerational trauma, postmemory, and historical trauma as it is manifested through contemporary literature written by survivors and their descendants and the descendants of perpetrators. This work led to the publication of an academic monograph, Vanished Lands: Memory and Postmemory in North American Lithuanian Diaspora Literature (Peter Lang International Academic Publishers, 2023). Laima Vincė dedicated years to researching, analyzing, writing about and translating the diary and poems of the Lithuanian Jewish poet, Matilda Olkinaitė (1922-1941) who was killed by local collaborators in the Holocaust. She published Matilda Olkinaitė’s poems in a bilingual Lithuanian and English poetry chapbook titled, The Cerulean Bird: Matilda Olkinaitė (Arc Publications, 2023). Together with editor, Mindaugas Kvietkauskas, she published Matilda’s diary and poems, along with surviving photographs and documents, in Lithuanian and in English translation as The Unlocked Diary (Institute of Lithuanian Language and Literature). Laima Vincė’s historical fiction novel, That Unspoken Word, tells the story of the last few years of Matilda’s life, weaving diary excerpts and poems into the narrative. Laima Vincė has published thirty books in the United States, United Kingdom, and Europe. She earned a PhD from Vilnius University, an MFA in Writing from Columbia University School of the Arts, an MFA in Nonfiction from the University of New Hampshire, and a BA in English and German from Rutgers University.