The Last Girl
Stephan Collishaw
 Steponas Daumantas, an elderly poet, walks the streets of Vilnius photographing young women with their babies. He becomes obsessed with one particular woman, Jolanta, and strikes up a friendship with her. Jolanta gives him a manuscript that her husband has written, and Daumantas promises to look at it and possibly show his publisher, but looses it when he gets drunk. As his friendship with the young woman deepens he can no longer hold back the memories that have been bubbling up for years. Svetlana is an ethnic Russian living in poverty in the back streets of Vilnius's Old Town. She does bits of washing for Daumantas and, when she encounters him drunk one night, saves a manuscript he leaves behind. Svetlana struggles to earn some money to send her son to England to work, while trying to survive with her brutal husband Ivan. She befriends a young prostitute, Ruta, and has memories of her own she does not wish to recall. Daumantas grows up in a small village close to Wilno and has early ambitions of being a poet. He falls in love with a local Jewish girl, Rachael. When Rachael rejects him he goes to university in Wilno. Some years later he sees Rachael again on the streets of Wilno with her Jewish husband. In 1939 the Communists invade Poland and hand back Wilno to the Lithuanians. Lithuanian thugs roam the streets; but that is nothing compared to what happens when the Germans invade. As the life is slowly choked from the Jewish population in the Vilna ghetto Rachael makes a desperate demand of Daumantas: take her child and save it.