It has been 95 years since the birth of engineer, émigré community activist, and youngest son of Jonas Šliūpas — Vytautas Jonas Šliūpas. He was born on October 24, 1930, in Palanga, where he spent fourteen years of his life. In Palanga, he completed elementary school and the first two grades of gymnasium. In 1944, together with his parents, he fled to Bregenz, Austria. After his father’s death, Vytautas Jonas and his mother moved to Germany and later emigrated to the United States, where he devoted himself to preserving his father’s written legacy and collecting archival materials.

Vytautas’s father, Jonas Šliūpas, had long and actively sought the legalization of civil registration, but the law was passed only on August 15, 1940, after Lithuania was occupied by the Soviets. The very next day after the Civil Registration Act came into force, Jonas Šliūpas registered his almost ten-year-old son Vytautas Jonas as the first entry in the Palanga civil registry’s birth records.

At just fourteen years old, Vytautas fled westward with his parents in October 1944. They lived in refugee camps in Austria and later in Germany, where soon after (on November 6, 1944) his father passed away. With no hope of returning to Lithuania, Vytautas and his mother, Grasilda Grauslytė-Šliūpienė, emigrated to the United States in 1947. Life had to go on: he needed to study, grow, and help his widowed mother. In America, Vytautas Jonas Šliūpas earned a university education – graduating in civil engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology and in hydraulics from the University of Wisconsin. During his studies, he was active in youth organizations, a Boy Scout, editor of the first Chicago Scout publication Lituanica, and the first chairman of the Lituanus magazine support committee. After completing his studies, in 1954, he married Vanda Fabijonavičiūtė, a future pharmacist from Mažeikiai. In 1957, they had a son, Kęstutis Jonas, and later a grandson, Viesulas Rokas.

Vytautas developed his career working around the world, living and working in many countries in Europe, Africa, South America, and Asia, where he participated in the construction of hydroelectric power plants and irrigation and drainage projects. Since 1958, he had visited as many as 126 countries. Despite his travels, he always found time for community involvement, often leading or founding various Lithuanian and international associations.

In 1985, Vytautas Jonas Šliūpas retired and devoted himself entirely to Lithuanian cultural work, engaging in Lithuanian-American organizations and collaborating with the press. In 1987, at his home in San Francisco, California, he established the Dr. Jonas Šliūpas “Aušrininkas” Archive in memory of his father. “The thought gave me no peace — if I don’t do this, no one else will,” he often said, dedicating himself to preserving and commemorating his father’s legacy.

The family archive soon grew into a large Lithuanian cultural archive in the American West. Lithuanians living in the U.S., Australia, Canada, and Poland began donating various publications and artifacts. Vytautas greatly wished to donate the archive to independent Lithuania, and in 2005 a cooperation agreement was signed with Šiauliai University. The first shipment arrived at the Šiauliai University Library in 2009, and on June 12 of that year, the archive was officially opened, with Vytautas Jonas Šliūpas and his wife Vanda in attendance.
“Being Lithuanian has always mattered to me. I feel like a patriot of Lithuania, and I care deeply about it,” he said.

Vytautas Jonas Šliūpas had a vivid memory of prewar Palanga, which he had to leave as a fourteen-year-old at the end of the war. He first returned to Palanga in 1988, from the U.S., and later spent summers there with his wife. In Palanga, he would also come for treatment and rehabilitation at the Institute of Psychophysiology and Rehabilitation of the Kaunas University of Medicine, located near the Dr. Jonas Šliūpas Museum on Šliūpas Street (today part of the LSMU Neuroscience Institute’s Palanga Clinic).

Near Kuršėnai, on the restored family land, he established the Auksučiai Agricultural Educational, Demonstration, and Forest Ecology Management Center. In 1997, together with volunteer scientists from the University of California, Davis, he founded the Auksučiai Foundation, dedicated to educating and supporting small farmers in Lithuania.

In 2000, marking both his father’s 140th birth anniversary and his own 70th birthday, he wrote and published a memoir titled “Father, As I Remember Him.”

Vytautas Jonas Šliūpas passed away on August 23, 2017, in Redwood City, California (USA). He was buried in the Lithuanian National Cemetery in Chicago, alongside his parents, Jonas and Grasilda Šliūpas.