I was technical editor of the weekly newspaper of this town, of 5000-6000 people, and the editor was one of my friends of my own age. And he was one day arrested by Germans and taken into the army, and so I was there then to replace him and to run the newspaper which I did for like a year until I had to leave. But, not exactly actually, my writings, sort of were noticed in the other, in the higher places of Lithuanian literary community, already in Vilnius and... you know, and they thought that I am too good to be with this little local newspaper, that I should go to some more important newspaper, so they drafted me to another city where there was a weekly literary newspaper with some other pages for news, but it was both very much literary weekly, where I again ended up by practically running it by myself because the chief editor was always somewhere else, and that is really, there, from there that I... and at the same time as I was working underground and I had to leave, you know, I decided to leave for Vienna because I was about to be arrested.
But already my, sort of literary reputation was growing and for one... very strange reason was that, I had read, I had just zoomed through all the libraries that I knew existed around my region and my town and the, this other town, and some of those libraries besides books contained also volumes of the back issues of some journals and magazines, and I had read them all, so whenever somebody was doing some article on something, on something and they did not know where to find it, they used to call me because I knew where to find it. I knew in what book, in what journal. So, that was the beginning of my sort of literary activities; I was writing also poetry. So my first poetry appeared in Lithuania and my first essays appeared already in Lithuania when I was 20. My first poem was published when I was 14 in one of the publications.