20 Euro Vydūnas

Vydūnas — the pen name of Wilhelm Storosta — spent decades as the defining cultural voice of Lithuanian Minor, the Prussian-administered region where ethnic Lithuanians had lived under German rule for centuries. When the Nazi regime came to power, his insistence on Lithuanian identity made him a target; he was arrested by the Gestapo in 1934 and held for several months before international pressure secured his release. He continued writing in exile until his death in West Germany in 1953, never returning to a Lithuania that had itself fallen behind the Iron Curtain.