Associate Professor Jokūbas Žirnauskas

Associate Professor Jokūbas Žirnauskas (1906–1970). Born in Ukmergė, Jokūbas Žirnauskas began his university studies rather late due to financial difficulties. He became a student at Vytautas Magnus University in 1936 and graduated in 1940. Prior to embarking on his studies, he learned the craft of a photographer and ran a photography studio. Having served in the Lithuanian army, he studied by himself, passed school-leaving examinations, and finished a gymnasium. As a talented student, from September 1940 he started working at Vilnius University as a technician at the laboratory of physical chemistry. The laboratory technician Jokūbas Žirnauskas was first dismissed from his job at the university on 22 June 1941 as a Jewish member of staff as per the order of the officer of educational affairs, who was subordinate to the Nazis. Žirnauskas was imprisoned in the Vilnius ghetto where together with other chemists he set up a small laboratory of household chemistry and produced tooth powder and shoe polish. In 1943, Jokūbas Žirnauskas escaped from the ghetto and, with the help of Professor Antanas Žvironas, he was lodged with a farmer in Aukštadvaris rural district, Trakai province. During the trial of Prof. Žvironas, Jokūbas Žirnauskas dared to write a letter in defence of the professor, in which he spoke not only of the professor’s academic merit but also rescuing of Jews during the Holocaust. He returned to Vilnius University and to his job as a laboratory technician on 25 July 1944. A year later he became an assistant in the Department of Physical Chemistry, in 1947 he was a senior lecturer, and later a candidate of chemical sciences (an equivalent of a PhD in chemistry). Although esteemed by his students and colleagues, the fact that he had relatives abroad (his biography shows that his sisters emigrated from Lithuania during the interwar period) and that he was keeping in touch with them was a cause for certain tensions. Inspectors of the compliance of the taught courses with Soviet ideology were of the opinion that the associate professor ‘under-represented the achievements of Soviet electrochemists, who were awarded the Stalin Prize’ in his lectures. Žirnauskas was seen by the Soviets as inert in the faculty’s social activities: although he was trusted with political agitation, he was not successful because he tried to raise and consider ‘dangerous political issues’. As a failed agitator, he was suspended from these duties, accused of passivity in carrying out students’ education in the spirit of Communism and staying aside of ‘the struggle against bourgeois nationalism’. Such an assessment of the associate professor was written on 1 September 1952 and it was sufficient for him to lose his job at the university for the second time.

Documents