October 9, 1926 – October 9, 2026
Ada
Gens-Ustjanauskas
At 100
A Century of Survival, Service and Freedom
Ada Gens-Ustjanauskas survived some of the darkest events in modern human history. She dedicated the rest of her life to helping ensure that others would not have to endure what she had — and to caring for those who emerged from circumstances much like her own.
But to understand why, you have to understand the Lithuania that raised her.
HER STORY DOES NOT BEGIN WITH WAR.
IT BEGINS WITH FREEDOM.
THE LITHUANIA THAT RAISED HER
1926–1940
A childhood in an independent republic.
FREEDOM DISAPPEARS
1940–1944
Soviet occupation, Nazi occupation and the Holocaust.
EXILE BECOMES SERVICE
1945–1989
Displacement, America, Connecticut and a lifetime helping others.
A COUNTRY RETURNS
1990–2026
Lithuanian independence, American public service and a return to freedom.
1926-1940
THE LITHUANIA THAT RAISED HER
Ada was born in 1926 into a Lithuanian republic that was itself only eight years old.
Her father, Jacob Gens, had volunteered to fight for Lithuanian independence as a teenager and later served as an officer in its army. Her mother, Elvyra Budreikaitė, served the young Lithuanian government.
Ada grew up in Kaunas among the generation that had built the new republic. She attended excellent schools, was close friends with children from Lithuania’s leading families, and was surrounded by language, music, discipline, education, friendship and family.
She walked Laisvės alėja — Freedom Avenue — through a city alive with universities, theaters, cafés and the confidence of a country discovering what independence could mean.
For Ada, democracy was never an abstract political idea. It was the world of her childhood.
Freedom was home.
1940
AND THEN FREEDOM DISAPPEARED.
Ada was thirteen when the Soviet Union occupied Lithuania. Her father was removed from his position. Family bank accounts were frozen. Friends and classmates disappeared as families were arrested and deported. The institutions of the independent country in which she had been raised were systematically dismantled.
The freedom Ada had known since birth was being actively destroyed before her very eyes.
1941–1944 · THE HOLOCAUST
ANOTHER OCCUPATION. A DIFFERENT CATASTROPHE.
In June 1941, Nazi Germany invaded Soviet-occupied Lithuania.
For Ada, the terror changed form almost overnight.
The Soviet occupation had dismantled the independent country in which she had been raised. The German occupation now placed her Jewish family in mortal danger.
Across Lithuania, Jewish communities that had existed for centuries were being systematically destroyed. In Vilnius, tens of thousands of Jews were forced into the ghetto; outside the city, Ponary became a killing site for the Jews of Vilna and thousands of others.
Ada’s father, Jacob Gens, became Chief of the Jewish Police and later head of the Vilna Ghetto administration. Ada lived outside the ghetto with her mother, Elvyra, under assumed identities, while repeatedly entering the ghetto and moving between two increasingly dangerous worlds.
On September 14, 1943, Jacob was summoned by the Gestapo and executed.
Ada was warned that she and her mother were now in immediate danger. The Gestapo searched their apartment, and the two fled Vilnius.
They eventually reached the Venclauskas family near Šiauliai, who hid Ada and Elvyra until the end of the German occupation.
By the time Ada emerged from hiding, much of her family, her childhood world, and Jewish Lithuania itself had been destroyed.
She was seventeen years old.
1944–1946 · DISPLACEMENT AND EXILE
SURVIVAL WAS ONLY THE BEGINNING.
When the German occupation ended in 1944, Soviet forces returned to Lithuania. For Ada and Elvyra, the end of Nazi rule did not mean the return of the independent country they had known. Lithuania again came under Soviet control.
They had survived the Holocaust in hiding. Now they faced another occupation and another reason to conceal who they were and where they had come from.
To survive the Nazis, they had been forced into hiding.
Surviving the Soviets meant hiding in plain sight.
In 1945, at nineteen years old, Ada and her mother escaped west through Poland and into Germany.
They entered a Europe filled with survivors, refugees and displaced people whose homes, families and countries had been destroyed.
Ada was one of them.
Yet while still a displaced person herself, she began working with organizations helping other refugees rebuild their lives.
That work would become one of the defining threads of her next seventy years.
In May 1946, Ada attended the Nuremberg Trials, where the leaders of the regime she had just survived were being judged before an international court.
The young woman who had depended upon others to survive would spend the rest of her life helping other people begin again.
1953–1990 · CONNECTICUT
CONNECTICUT — WHERE SURVIVAL BECAME SERVICE
Ada and Antanas Ustjanauskas came to Connecticut carrying the experience of war, occupation, displacement and exile. They spent the decades that followed building not only a new life for themselves, but institutions and businesses that helped other families do the same.
COSMOS INTERNATIONAL
A meeting place for immigrant Connecticut
For nearly seventy years, Ada and Antanas owned and operated Cosmos International in West Hartford, a European, Indian and Middle Eastern grocery store and deli serving generations of both Americans and immigrant families alike.
Downstairs was the store. Upstairs was Ada’s office.
From that office, Ada spent decades helping immigrant families complete immigration paperwork and navigate the difficult process of establishing secure lives in the United States.
PARCEL AGENCIES
Keeping families connected across the Iron Curtain
For the better part of forty years, Ada and Antanas operated four parcel agencies, helping families in America send necessities to relatives living behind the Iron Curtain.
For people separated by borders they could not freely cross, the parcels represented more than commerce.
They were lifelines.
U.S. IMMIGRATION
Helping others begin again
Ada also worked professionally in U.S. immigration, continuing the work she had first begun as a displaced person in postwar Europe.
The refugee who had once depended upon others for help spent the rest of her life helping newcomers find stability, legal status and a place in America.
THE HUNDRED CLUB OF CONNECTICUT
Service beyond their own community
In 1967, Ada and Antanas founded the Hundred Club of Connecticut, created to support the families of police officers, firefighters and other public-safety personnel killed in the line of duty.
Their experience of loss had taught them something lasting:
when a family loses someone in service to others, the community has a responsibility to remain.
OFFICE OF SPECIAL INVESTIGATIONS
From survivor to federal interpreter
Decades after surviving Nazi persecution herself, Ada served as an interpreter for the U.S. government’s Office of Special Investigations, including cases involving alleged Nazi war criminals.
That gives us one of the most extraordinary circles in her life:
She survived Nazi persecution as a teenager. Decades later, she helped the American government investigate those accused of participating in Nazi crimes.
What began as survival became a lifetime of service.
But even after decades in Connecticut, Ada and Antanas never stopped working for the country they had been forced to leave.
1953–1990 · LITHUANIA IN EXILE
THEY NEVER GAVE UP ON LITHUANIA.
Ada and Antanas built a full life in Connecticut, but they never accepted that Soviet occupation had permanently erased the country they had known.
For decades, Lithuania remained part of their daily lives — through Lithuanian organizations, civic and political work, relationships with families behind the Iron Curtain, and the businesses they built to keep people connected across borders.
Their commitment was deeply personal. Both had come from independent Lithuania. Both had experienced Soviet repression. Ada had watched the country her parents’ generation helped build disappear when she was thirteen; Antanas had served Lithuania and suffered under occupation himself.
America became their home. Lithuania remained their country.
They belonged to a generation of exiles who refused to allow occupation to become permanence — preserving the language, memory and idea of an independent Lithuania until the day independence could return.
Antanas passed away in 1972, never living to see Lithuania free again. Ada carried their shared commitment forward.
Then, in 1990, the impossible began to happen.
The country Ada had lost as a child was returning. And after spending nearly half a century fighting to keep its memory alive, she would now help reconnect it with the United States.
1990–1994 · A FREE LITHUANIA RETURNS
FROM EXILE TO THE WHITE HOUSE
For nearly fifty years, Ada had lived with the memory of the Lithuania she had lost.
Then, as the Soviet Union weakened and Lithuania moved to restore its independence, the worlds of her childhood and her American life suddenly came together.
In December 1990, Ada served as interpreter during Vytautas Landsbergis’s meeting with President George H. W. Bush in the Oval Office. Bush reaffirmed U.S. support for Baltic self-determination and reiterated that the United States had never recognized the forcible incorporation of Lithuania into the Soviet Union.
1990
THE OVAL OFFICE
The country Ada had lost as a child was now sitting across from an American president — and Ada was helping them speak to one another.
The meeting came at one of the most uncertain moments in Lithuania’s struggle to restore its independence, while Soviet power still hung over the country.
Nearly fifty years after occupation had forced Ada from Lithuania, she was now in the Oval Office, ensuring that the Lithuanian delegation’s words — and the meaning behind them — came through with the precision demanded by a meeting at the highest level of government.
1992
BACK TO VILNIUS
Two years later, Ada returned to Lithuania with Vice President Dan Quayle and interpreted his independence speech in Vilnius.
Quayle’s visit came as the United States and Lithuania were rebuilding formal ties after the Soviet period; he publicly pledged the continuing friendship of the American people to Lithuania.
For Ada, the symbolism was extraordinary:
She had fled Lithuania at nineteen because she could no longer safely remain there. Decades later, she returned as an American interpreter celebrating the country’s restored independence.
1994
FREE BALTIC SOIL
In 1994, Ada served as the Lithuanian interpreter during President Bill Clinton’s Baltic visit.
Standing in Riga, Clinton described himself as the first U.S. president to set foot on free Baltic soil and spoke of expanding democracy, security and the Baltic states’ integration with the West.
BEYOND DIPLOMACY
Ada’s work did not end with presidential visits. She later spent months interpreting for Lithuanian security personnel training in the United States with the FBI and U.S. military, and returned to Lithuania with American officials as the restored country strengthened its institutions.
Her father helped defend Lithuania’s first republic in uniform. Ada and Antanas spent decades in exile working for its return. And when Lithuania was free again, Ada helped defend its restored independence in her own right — through diplomacy, interpretation and security work between Lithuania and the United States.
1944–1991 · MEMORY UNDER SOVIET RULE
JEWISH LITHUANIA — DESTROYED, THEN OBSCURED
The Holocaust destroyed most of Jewish Lithuania. But when Soviet rule returned in 1944, Jewish history did not simply re-emerge.
Jewish religious, cultural and political life had already been heavily restricted under the first Soviet occupation. After the Holocaust, Soviet commemoration often subsumed specifically Jewish victims into broader categories of “Soviet citizens” or “victims of fascism,” while important Jewish sites were neglected, repurposed or destroyed.
MEMORIALS
PONARY
Holocaust survivors erected a Jewish memorial at Ponary in 1948. In 1952, Soviet authorities ordered it demolished and replaced it with an obelisk to the “Victims of Fascist Terror.”
The Paneriai Memorial notes that during the Soviet period, the fact that the majority of those murdered there were Jews was ignored.
SYNAGOGUES
THE GREAT SYNAGOGUE
The Great Synagogue of Vilnius had been badly damaged during the war, but it still survived afterward.
It was completely destroyed in 1953 as part of Soviet urban-development plans, and a kindergarten was later built on the site.
CEMETERIES
ŠNIPIŠKĖS & UŽUPIS
From 1948–1955, Soviet authorities removed the gravestones from Šnipiškės; in 1971, the Palace of Sports was built over part of the cemetery above unexhumed remains.
Užupis, with some 70,000 burials, was closed in 1959 and destroyed by 1965. Jewish gravestones were reused throughout Vilnius as construction material, including for public stairs on Tauras Hill.
The Holocaust shattered Jewish Lithuania. Soviet rule then erased much of what survived — synagogues, cemeteries, memorials, and even the Jewish identity of the dead themselves.
PRESERVING WHAT REMAINS
THIS IS WHY THE GENS FAMILY PROJECT EXISTS.
The Gens Family Project works to recover the people, places and stories left behind by the destruction of Jewish Lithuania — preserving testimony, documenting sites, reconnecting families and returning individual lives to the historical record.
What was meant to disappear can still be named, documented and remembered.
2026 · A CENTURY LATER
WHY ADA’S STORY MATTERS NOW
On October 9, Ada Gens-Ustjanauskas turns one hundred. In the same year, the United States marks 250 years of independence.
Ada remembers an independent Lithuania before occupation, Jewish life before the Holocaust, the destruction brought by two totalitarian regimes and nearly half a century of exile. She then lived long enough to watch the country she had lost return to the map — and to take part in its renewed relationship with the United States.
For Ada, the consequences of losing freedom are not theoretical. She has already seen what follows when freedom disappears.
Few living lives connect so many of the defining events of the twentieth century — and fewer still can tell that story in their own voice.
FOR MEDIA & INTERVIEWS
ADA’S STORY IS AVAILABLE TO TELL.
For Ada Gens-Ustjanauskas’s 100th birthday, the Gens Family Project is making available the archival material, testimony and historical documentation behind her century-long story.
Alexander Phibbs is available for interviews about Ada’s life, The Girl from Freedom Avenue, the Gens family, Lithuanian independence, Holocaust history, and the project’s archival work.
The Gens Family Project can provide documentary footage, Ada’s recorded testimony, family photographs, White House records, Nuremberg material, government documents, and archival research from Lithuania, Israel and the United States.
October 9, 2026 · Ada Gens-Ustjanauskas turns 100
Alexander Phibbs · Founder & President
The Gens Family Project · 860-930-3953 · Alexander@gensfamily.org