A story about the life of partisan Emilia (Ema) Lajunienė

Emilija Lujanienė was born in 1910 in the village of Siečiai, Klovainiai rural municipality, Pakruojis district. The Lujani family had 8 children. All of them were raised patriotically and belonged to a riflemen's organization. Emilija learned how to handle weapons in her childhood, because her father was a hunter. Emilija moved to the village of Lujėnai in the Radviliškis rural municipality of Nemunėlis. Her husband Petras Lujanas and his family “[...] were also great patriots, and in the post-war years they maintained contacts with the partisans”18. E. Lujanienė's father-in-law Petras Lujanas (born 1878) and her husband Petras Lujanas (born 1911) were arrested on January 17, 1946 and imprisoned in Siberian camps. On that fateful day, Emilija managed to escape and hide. First, she joined Roberts Tučas's unit. As D. Ivanauskaitė-Tabakienė said: "After about a year of partisanship, she was arrested, returned from the Biržai NKVD with burned soles of her feet and burned hands. She quickly ran into the forest to the partisans and said that they had recruited her, only in this way she escaped from their clutches. Then, as far as I know, she soon joined Jonas Krivickas' unit."

R. Indrikas, a comrade from the days of struggle, recalls that E. Lujanienė was a creative woman, she cooked and wrote poems very deliciously: “Although Emilija Lujanienė was uneducated, she really wanted to write poems, she simply envied Bronius Krivickas’ talent. And sometimes, sitting on a stump in the forest, with her machine gun next to her, she would write, compose poems. [...] In the bunker, Emilija would sit and write. She would write, compose, and constantly consult with Jonas Krivickas about how to write it better, what words to choose. Jonas would help her. And when she wrote the whole poem, she would read it aloud to us.”21

In 1953, on the second day of Easter, the bunker in the Surgieniai Forest, in the territory of present-day Latvia, where E. Lujanienė was hiding, was surrounded. Jonas Krivickas, who was in the field with Emilija, was shot, and the partisan Povilas Dagys, who was in the bunker, blew himself up. Emilija tried to escape, but failed. She was arrested and sentenced to 25 years in a camp.