"We will not surrender alive!": the last hours in the bunker
On January 7, 1948, in the forest of Miliai village, Viekšniai parish, after a long resistance, two young partisans - Pranas Šiuipys and Albertas Švažas - died after refusing to surrender to the Soviet army.
A partisan bunker was set up in the forest of Miliai village, in a picturesque place between the Venta River and the Ubaginė and Maigai forests. Three young men - Pranas Šiuipys, Leonas Jonuškis and Albertas Švažas - hid here.
In the early morning of January 7, 1948, before dawn, the bunker was surrounded. "While it was still dark, soldiers in white camouflage coats poured in. There could have been over fifty of them," recalls Alfonsas Virkutis, a former farmer from the village of Miliai.
During the shootout, Leonas Jonuškis surrendered, and the remaining two partisans refused to surrender. The Chekists, trying to take them alive, sent civilians into the bunker. They wounded Kazimieras Buta, and later brought Dom Rimkus. The partisans, realizing the trap, stopped shooting at the unarmed man. Rimkus' daughter Stasė Pranauskienė remembers the words of Pranas Šiuipis: "We will not surrender alive! Death does not scare us."
Pranas Šiuipys worked as a boy in the village of Lėlaičiai. His sister Ona Perminienė recalls: "He was a brave, strong and clever man. An honest Lithuanian. Maybe he sensed his misfortune, because he looked at the approaching front with great sorrow." Albertas Švažas, born in 1918, had completed six grades of high school and served as a volunteer in the Lithuanian army.
When the bunker filled with smoke and fire, it is believed that the young men blew themselves up with their last grenade. Their bodies were taken to Viekšniai and dumped near the striby headquarters. They were later secretly reburied, but the location of their grave is unknown.
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Miliai (Krakiai) partisan bunker
About 1.5 km east of the Krakiai settlement, in the Jonuškis forest, on the right bank of the Kutuvys River, a former hiding place for participants in the post-war freedom struggle has been restored.
On January 3, 1948, betrayed by an MGB agent, two partisans died here after a heroic fight: 29-year-old member of the "Alka" squad, group leader Albertas Švažas-Vanagas, and 25-year-old Pranas Šiuipys.
In 1999, a small oak cross was erected at this location, and in 2005, a pillar in the shape of a Vytis cross was erected in the forest near the Kuršėnai–Mažeikiai road to commemorate those who died. In the same year, the remains of the partisans were reburied in the Viekšniai cemetery.
"When we started work, there was a heavily overgrown area with grass and birch trees. We started digging slowly, hoping to find the remains of the bunker's logs, but we didn't find them; all we found was a rusty grenade. We dug up two large stones and then it became clear that we were in the right place - according to witnesses, the bunker was between those stones, and partisans would jump through them to get inside to mislead uninvited guests," said P. Trakinis about the bunker's installation.
A drawing of the partisan bunker was found in archival documents, and the current bunker was reconstructed based on it in 2010. Its construction corresponds to the original drawing, but, according to contemporaries, it was "shallow", smaller in size, and built of logs.