It was warm enough and there wasn't any snow, so I went to the areas being guarded on my bike that day. Then I decided to go home to eat. I thought I could rest an hour, and then go back to the tower. I live not far from the “Northern Town" and on my way home I met up with a column of military vehicles that was coming from there. There were about 20 tanks and armored vehicles. I began to follow the vehicles. Then more cars joined in. The column was moving rather slowly - or maybe I was going fast, because I could outrun the column and return back to the end if had wanted to. I left the column behind by Parliament because I thought that they would turn there. But I was wrong. They went through the tunnel and I turned as well because I thought that they might go towards the TV and Radio Center. But they turned towards Karoliniškės...
I passed the column and drove to the tower. There were already five tanks and some other military vehicles standing at the entrance to the tower. A tank was moving its barrel rather aggressively. As soon as I got there it began to fire blanks. The sound was deafening. The windows of the surrounding houses lit up and people gathered around. That lasted at least 15 minutes. At first I watched the military vehicles below, but then someone said that tanks were already moving towards the tower. Leaving my bike, I ran there and saw military vehicles and tanks approaching from the road. Without any kind of ceremony, they broke through the fence. Five tanks and five personnel carriers had already arrived at the tower. The vehicles stopped and paratroopers got out. We waited. Perhaps they'll attack, perhaps they won't attack. Perhaps they'll push, perhaps they'll threaten us. The paratroopers rallied into one circle and launched an attack on a narrow section of the crowd. At a distance of about 2 meters, they threw some sort of metal objects in an effort to thin out the crowd. There were at least 10 rows of people. The soldiers had metal sticks. Some threw them down - maybe it was awkward running with those sticks as well as with tommy guns. When they threw them on the ground, you could hear the familiar clank of metal. Other paratroopers were beating people with those sticks. But people didn't run, they just stood there. Young men were pushing paratroopers away. You might say that that first attack wasn't a very successful one...
After a few seconds, a support troop came running over, probably from another vehicle. They also started throwing things and after a second there was an explosion in the crowd. They had thrown some sort of explosive. The crowd thinned out a bit because some people were injured I'm afraid. Everyone remained calm, and not a single suggestion was made to leave. I think that most guards would warn a thief before firing, even if they were sure of the thief's guilt and would shout: „Halt! I'll fire!" Then the guard has to fire into the air, and only after this does he have the moral right to shoot a person. Yet here the actions began immediately, without a single word of warning...
Once the crowd had thinned out, the paratroopers started to push their way forward. You could hear broken glass falling. Men tried to push the paratroopers away. It seemed to me that the women suffered more from blank weapons, crow bars, and the butts of sub-machine guns. Right before my eyes a woman was hit in the shoulder with a grenade-thrower...
Those soldiers were somehow stupified, their reactions were slow and their faces were without expression: no traces of cruelty, nothing. It's impossible to say what they were thinking and what they wanted - only their actions revealed their intentions... They started to force their way through to the tower. Another young man and I found ourselves in the middle of the paratroopers. Struggling with them, I tried to escape from the crowd and had almost succeeded when I fell down. It seemed that a paratrooper had fallen down with me, and someone else fell too. Then you could hear shooting and two bullets from inside the crowd went through my hips. The paratrooper who had fallen shot a series from his tommy-gun. My wounds were difficult to cure, maybe because their bullets weren't completely sterile. The pain was unbearable, and my leg started to contract convulsively. For a second I thought that I had been shot and that everything was over. But then some sort of determination rose inside me, a desire to live. I turned over and began to crawl, pulling myself along with my hands. While crawling I saw that other people had fallen as well, and there were women among them. Some of them were probably already dead, because they weren't moaning or groaning. Or maybe they had been so knocked out that there were simply no signs of life...
Two guys grabbed me and dragged me from the crowd. Then a group of people took me more comfortably to an ambulance. There wasn't any space there, it was loaded with people. The medics were moaning that some dead people had already been brought. One of the people had a car and took me to the hospital. It wasn't easy to leave because there were a lot of cars there, barricades had been erected, and tanks were standing there.
By the way, when I was being carried down the hill, I noticed that there wasn't any panic whatsoever! No one was running from the tower - everyone was going up towards it. Only when injured people were being carried away did the people separate, making a narrow passage. I don't know what kept those defen¬seless people there, it's really a difficult thing to explain.
Lithuania, 1991.01.13 : documents, testimonies, comments. - Vilnius : State Publishing Center, 1992, p. 112-114.