15 April Varena Culture Centre hosted the National song festival “Songs from Exile”. The event aimed to remind the mass deportations in the spring of 1948 and 1949 and pay tribute to the people who experienced the Soviet repressions and had kept their hope alive to get back home one day.
The festival was attended by more than a hundred participants from Vilnius, Kaunas, Panevezys, Alytus, Prienai, Raseiniai and Varena. The teachers who prepared their students think that such events are not only a good opportunity to demonstrate artistic abilities of their students, but also act as live history lessons on the deportations of Lithuanian citizens and their life, relationships, hopes and dreams in exile. The song festival “Songs from Exile” was co-organised by the Secretariat of the International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes in Lithuania and Varena “Azuolas” Gymnasium Tolerance Education Centre (hereafter TEC).