Vilnius, the 1930s. Jadwiga and her friends are pupils at the local Queen Jadwiga’s School, living their tumultuous teen lives in the years leading immediately to World War II. The war will soon put an end to their world, and yet, at this very moment, their lives are very much about normal teenage stuff – like going to the movies to see Mata Hari on screen, or smoking their first cigarettes, Feminas. In the excerpt below, Kristina Sabaliauskaitė revisits a Vilnius-Wilno-Vilne that is no more; a multicultural city, with entangled Polish, Jewish and Lithuanian history; a place where, as she says, “first impressions are often deceptive.”

If you were to ask anyone in Vilnius today where Queen Jadwiga’s School is – no one would even know what you were talking about. The only royal things left in today’s Vilnius are King Mindaugas Bridge and the monument next to it, commemorating Lithuania’s only crowned king, standing in such a way that, according to today’s young Vilnians who are not short of wit, if you were to look at it from a certain angle it would seem he was holding not a sword but amusing himself by pulling on his royal member. But nobody would have heard of Queen Jadwiga’s School. And only a guide who is a ghost, risen from a grave with a moss-covered angel leaning over it in one of Wilno’s old cemeteries – the Rossa, the Bernardine, or St Peter and Paul’s – would have been able to have shown you the school.

Queen Jadwiga’s girls’ high school before World War II was in a building marked with the number 19 on St Anne’s Street. By the way, no one today will be able to show you St Anne’s Street either. Nor will you find it on a map of the city. Not unless you had a special map – of a completely different Vilnius that has disappeared and is no longer visible. A ghostly map of Wilno in which only dead souls reside. A city with the Bristol and George hotels, with all three Sztrall cafés – the White, the Green and the Red, the Pohulanka and the White Pillars, formerly marking an entry into Wilno, the Jewish Credit Bank, located with real Wilno irony in German Street, Stefan Batory University and its students wearing their velvet caps. So, in such a city there undoubtedly was a St Anne’s Street and a girls’ high school at number 19. Today none of that is there any more because the times have changed, as well as the people, for whom priests have become more important than saints, and for that reason St Anne’s Street is now called Maironis