Magdalena Avietėnaitė

Magdalena Avietėnaitė (22 December 1892 – 13 August 1984) was a Lithuanian journalist, diplomat and a public figure.

Biography In 1899, Avietėnaitė and her family emigrated to Worcester, Massachusetts. In 1914 she graduated from the University of Geneva in the field of literature and philosophy. From 1914 to 1920, she edited the weekly newspaper Amerikos lietuvis (American Lithuanian).

Avietėnaitė returned to Lithuania in 1920 in response to the call by the president, Antanas Smetona, to the Lithuanian diaspora on 2 November 1919. In Lithuania, she worked at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs until 1940 as a translator, encipherer, secret archive processor and a confidential secretary. From 1924 to 1926, she was the Head of the Lithuanian News Agency ELTA, from 1926 the Head of the Press Bureau, following that, Director of the Press and Information Department.

Avietėnaitė organized Lithuanian art exhibitions in cities including Barcelona, Liège, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Gothenburg, Chicago, and Brussels. During the preparation for the International Exposition of Art and Technology in Modern Life, in Paris in 1937, the Lithuanian pavilion, including Avietėnaitė, was assigned to elect the Chair of the Exhibition Committee.

On 17 June 1940, after the Soviet occupation, Avietėnaitė and her co-worker Elena Barščiauskaitė risked their lives to remove and transmit Ministry of Foreign Affairs secret files to the Head of the Lithuanian Archives and priest Juozapas Stakauskas.