Diplomato Jurgio Savickio drama
ENOn December 2, 1938, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Kaunas issued a diplomatic passport to Jurgis Savickis as the Permanent Representative of Lithuania to the League of Nations in Geneva. On March 23, 1939, Klaipėda region was captured. Lithuania was angry, but no one defended it. The League of Nations had only sympathy. On 18 March, 1940, Savickis officially bid farewell to Joseph Avenol, Secretary-General of the League of Nations and was elected Head of the Propaganda Division under the Council of Ministers. His job would be to keep in touch with the editors of major daily newspapers, to provide them and their newspapers with information and to explain government policies. The diplomat felt that Lithuania would not be the same, so he needed a quick orientation: to reject the offer. If not, resign the diplomatic service. He realized that it would be better to wait, justifying a more convincing excuse, than to make unrealistic politics when the Soviets established military bases in the Baltic States. The end of the honorable diplomatic service was painful. Savickis did not receive a diplomat’s annuity, because he was not 50 (he turned 50 only in early May). But three months later the Lithuanian state ceased to exist. Perhaps by chance, almost a miracle accompanied the writer, a former diplomat in the most critical days for Lithuania. Jurgis Savickis chose the difficult path of an expatriate. He died in 1952 and was buried in Roquebrune Cemetery, near Monte Carlo, South France.
