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.

Lithuanian immigrants came to Chicago in three waves. At the turn of the 20th century thousands of Litvaks (Lithuanian Jews) fled the pogroms under Russian rule, while mostly blue-collar workers came for jobs in the stockyards. (The main character in “The Jungle”, Upton Sinclair’s portrait of the horrific working conditions in Chicago’s slaughterhouses, is Jurgis Rudkus, a Lithuanian immigrant.) After the second world war a second wave of refugees fleeing the Soviet occupation arrived via displaced-person (DP) camps in western Europe. And, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, a third wave of immigrants were drawn to Chicago because their compatriots sponsored them to come.

The unusual vibrancy of the Lithuanian community, says Linas Gylys, president of the Lithuanian World Centre, who was born in a DP camp in Germany, comes from those second-generation immigrants, who were forced to leave a country they adored. Mr Gylys’ family emigrated first to Australia and then to Chicago, because his mother, a writer, wanted to live in a place with a large community of Lithuanian speakers. At one point the Windy City was home to some 300,000 Lithuanians, 11 Catholic Lithuanian parishes, several schools and dozens of Lithuanian shops and restaurants making kugelis (potato pudding) and chilled borscht. Draugas (“Friend”), the world’s oldest continuously published Lithuanian newspaper, is based in Chicago, as is the Balzekas Museum of Lithuanian Culture, the biggest such museum outside Lithuania. America’s only Lithuanian-language Alcoholics Anonymous group gathers in Lemont. (According to the World Health Organisation, Lithuanians are the world’s heaviest drinkers.)

Second-wave immigrants usually did not allow their children to speak English at home. They sent them to Lithuanian Saturday school, Sunday mass and summer camps. They encouraged them to join Lithuanian choirs, dancing troupes and Scouts—and to date Lithuanian boys and girls. Arts, sports and the Catholic church glued the community together.

But however attached their elders may be to the homeland, few if any of the youngsters dribbling basketballs on the new court at the Lithuanian World Centre intend to return. Almost 1m Lithuanians have emigrated since 1990, draining the country of talent and youth. Yet as per capita income rises there, the trend seems to be reversing; in 2017 more Lithuanians returned than left. And the diaspora was more active than ever this year, the centenary of the country’s independence. Tens of thousands, many from Chicago, travelled to Vilnius for a week-long festival of dance and song. For a few days at least, history’s traumas were forgotten.