Statesmen are not made overnight. They grow from small but decisive choices. His Excellency President Valdas Adamkus is a striking example.

“In 1943, during the German occupation, my life took a decisive turn,” he recalls. At his Kaunas high school, he and his friends began publishing a magazine called Jaunime, budėk (“Youth, Awake”). “Our goal was to reach the younger generation. And we succeeded.” During the first Soviet occupation, they even sang the Lithuanian national anthem in the school hall.

The turmoil of war pushed him into refugee camps in Germany. “Sports played a key role in reviving Lithuanian social life,” says Adamkus, recalling the Olympics for the Occupied Peoples, where he carried the Lithuanian flag. It was a quiet but powerful sign to the world that Lithuania still lived.

In the United States, Valdas Adamkus found new ways to fight for Lithuania: organizing youth, leading petitions, delivering 40,000 signatures to the White House, and presenting a memorandum on Lithuanian freedom to the United Nations. “We moved in every way we could, doing what we imagined and were able to do to make the movement happen.”

Today, looking at an independent Lithuania, the President says: “It was worth living.”

In the podcast Beyond Economics and Back, LFMI president Elena Leontjeva talks with President Valdas Adamkus about how the courage of a high school student can grow into the responsibility of a statesman.