Nearly 50 years of the history of Lithuania’s consulate general in Chicago are closely tied to the figures of the diplomats Dr. Petras Povilas Daužvardis and his wife Juzefa Rauktytė-Daužvardienė. Archival documents show that in 1970, a year before Dr. P. P. Daužvardis’s passing, the Lithuanian legation in Washington, D.C. with the knowledge of the U.S. State Department raised the issue of joining the legation and the consulates general in Chicago and New York into a single entity. The arguments offered by Consul General Dr. P. P. Daužvardis gave precedence to the question of personnel over the question of finances and helped save the diplomatic post in Chicago from being abolished. More than a month before the consul general’s death (September 26, 1971), the Supreme Committee for the Liberation of Lithuania (VLIK) became concerned with the question of who would become the chief of the consulate general in Chicago. Thanks to Dr. P. P. Daužvardis’s arguments and the support given them by the head of the Lithuanian Diplomatic Service and the consuls general in New York and Toronto, it was J. Rauktytė-Daužvardienė who was named the Lithuanian honorary consul general in Chicago after her husband’s death.

Even though the Second World War was over, the word was still haunted by the presentiment of another war. This is evident from headlines in the current press, commentaries by political leaders, and private letters. In the period from 1946 to 1950 the Lithuanian and French linguist Algirdas Julius Greimas corresponded with colleagues about his fears that a future military conflict might be coming and about possibilities of evacuating people (first of all, women and children) from that war zone. Strikingly, the Polish writer Jerzy Giedroyc, editor of the literary-political magazine Kultura also received recommendation to move from Europe to the United States in case a war erupted. Equally unexpected is the fact that these two Parisians, Greimas and Giedroyc, were indirectly broght into contact by the writer and poet Czeslaw Milosz. Historical facts that at first sight have been collected eclectically may turn out to demarcate a field of unanticipated discoveries.