On the way to the trolley-bus depot, my friend and I saw three large vehicles that were simply labelled “Liudi" (..People"). All of the windows of the guard-room were broken, and the barrier was bent. Once we returned to the lobby of the Press House, we saw that soldiers had come in those three vehicles. They had already formed a square, and around it there were people. Suddenly, without any warning, the soldiers opened fire and rushed towards the entrance. The people didn't run away - they stood between the doors. Soldiers started to beat the people standing in front with the butts of their guns. The people didn't withdraw. Then the soldiers withdrew and stood in the same position that they had earlier. They were very young - probably in their first year of service - and their faces were frozen.
When I saw that the Press House had been taken over, I decided to go to the TV tower During the day there hadn't been that many people, but there were a lot more at night.
On Friday night, a car drove up a few times to the fence surrounding the TV tower. It would stand there for a while and then drive away. That night it did that maybe 5 times, and later, on „Bloody Sunday", tanks appeared from the same direction... Jermalavičius' voice was making announcements about the decrees of „the committee", the introduction of a curfew, and the fact that power was in his hands. His appeal to his “brothers and sisters" infuriated the people most of all.
It didn't take long for the paratroopers to push us away from the tower. I took a closer look at the soldiers. There weren't many of them, and they were relatively young. Their faces were sallow and looked strange. People were shouting in Russian: „Think about what you're doing!" “What would your mothers say?" “Don't you have mothers?"
I heard someone say: “I'm injured." He said it very simply and without pain. People caught an injured man falling over the bank and took him to an ambulance parked nearby. Soldiers fired at their feet. The tower was already in their hands. That shooting was totally unnecessary, pointless. But they continued to shoot. Five more wounded were carried away one after another. A smoke bomb was thrown on the other side of the building. The smoke was white and thick. It didn't rise either, it just stayed in the pit. It was hard to breathe. I crossed the street and met a colleague of mine. We decided that everything was over here and that we should go to Parliament. The entire time that I was at the tower, I was preoccupied with one thought - how our Parliament was holding up.
When we got to Parliament, a priest was blessing the people as if they were soldiers going to battle. I remember his words, asking that those who couldn't hold out leave. Very few left. It was announced that tanks were coming. We stood in a line blocking the central entrance.
The deputies of the Supreme Council left to talk things over. At 9:00 in the morning there was supposed to be a „Jedinstvo" meeting. We knew that they wouldn't come on a day-off. But we were all sure that there would be a gathering of plain-clothed soldiers. We pressed into the square across from the building so that there would be a space between us and them. I stayed in the square until half past eleven. There were a lot of people. I heard some sort of noise when I was walking along Žvėrynas towards Karoliniškės. A tank was driving along Cosmonaut Prospect from early in the morning, blaring announcements about the curfew and things like that. My daughter said that people whistled when it drove by the bus-stops.
Lithuania, 1991.01.13 : documents, testimonies, comments. - Vilnius : State Publishing Center, 1992, p. 227-229.