ONE of the artefacts on display at the Lithuanian World Centre, a vast community centre on more than 18 acres of land in Lemont, a leafy village on the outskirts of Chicago, is a wooden sculpture of Hitler and Stalin scalping a kneeling man. The man is Lithuania. The country suffered under Soviet, Nazi and again Soviet occupations for 50 years, and before that under tsarist rule. "We used to be the largest country in Europe and then we just disappeared from the map," says Marijus Gudynas of the Lithuanian Foreign Office, in Vilnius. These traumas have left 1.3m Lithuanians (from a country of barely 3m) living abroad. Chicago is their undisputed capital. Around 100,000 residents still call themselves Lithuanian, though they are often third- or even fourth-generation immigrants. Valdas Adamkus, twice president of newly independent Lithuania, went back after living in Chicago for decades.
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