Alma Adamkienė, former first lady and wife of President Valdas Adamkus, has passed away at the age of 96.
Her husband Valdas Adamkus served as Lithuania’s second post-independence president from 1998-2003 and 2004-2009.
Adamkienė had been struggling with health problems for some time. In April 2023, she suffered a stroke and was treated at Santara Clinics. In autumn 2019, she also suffered a stroke and was hospitalised for almost a month. The effects of the stroke, as President Valdas Adamkus said in May 2022, were still felt by Mrs Adamkienė more than two years later.
“Alma Adamkiene was a wonderful First Lady of Lithuania, who not only represented Lithuania well, forged warm personal relations with the partners of foreign leaders, but also was a real support for President Valdas Adamkus, accompanying him on his trips to Lithuania and his visits abroad, and staying with him both at the peaks of his life and at difficult moments,” President Gitanas Nausėda said in a press statement on Sunday.
“We say goodbye to Alma Adamkienė, a bright personality who left a special mark on the life of Lithuania. In our memory, Alma Adamkienė will always remain alongside President Valdas Adamkus, a wife and companion, the First Lady of Lithuania, who showed the highest personal culture with her attitude, and who devoted a lot of energy to charitable activities,” former president Dalia Grybauskaitė said in her message of condolence.
“Alongside the sadness of the painful loss that we feel today, the bright memory of Alma Adamkienė is with us and will always be with us. Her respect for others, her kindness, her consideration for the weak are what earned her the admiration and love of so many people,” Lithuanian Prime Ministr Ingrida Šimonytė said in a statement released by her office on Sunday.
In February, Adamkienė celebrated her 96th birthday. “We are very happy that we have lived happily and richly to this day. It is fortunate that we are both destined to live to such a beautiful age,” Adamkus told LRT.lt last year.
Adamkienė was born on February 10, 1927, in Šiauliai, to the family of Stasys Nutautas, a merchant, and Ona Soblytė-Nutautienė.
When the Soviet army invaded Lithuania in 1944, Adamkienė, then Nutautaitė, fled to Germany with her family. There, she graduated from the Eixtet Gymnasium and later studied at the Faculty of Philology of the University of Erlangen.
Five years after arriving in Germany, the whole family moved to the United States. There, Adamkienė worked as a technician in a steel factory and later in an insurance company. In 1951, she married Valdas Adamkus. The couple did not have any children.
From 1962 onwards, she managed the Tabor Farma summer resort for twenty-five years. The site became a centre of the US Lithuanian community. The young Adamkus family bought the resort from Juozas Bačiūnas, an activist of the Lithuanian-American community. For years, it hosted the congresses of the liberal Lithuanian diaspora organisation Santara-Šviesa.
Charitable activities
In the autumn of 1997, when the presidential election campaign was still underway, she said that no matter what the outcome of the election, she would be involved in charity work in Lithuania.
After her husband Adamkus won the election in 1998, Adamkienė continued her words and in 1999 the Adamkienė Charity and Support Foundation was established to help children. The foundation later changed its name to Raising the Future.
In addition to children, the foundation focused on helping the elderly, especially those without family.
“What they need is not material help, but moral help - they should be visited, they should be given a small gift or just greeted, and they will know that they have not been forgotten,” Adamkienė told 15min.lt.
Love that lasted for decades
Adamkus and Adamkienė met one another in a Lithuanian gymnasium in Eichstadt, Germany. In his book Alma, published on the occasion of the first lady’s 80th birthday, Adamkus described his impressions on first meeting his future spouse:
“As the gymnasium students gathered, my gaze fell on a yellow-haired, blue-eyed girl. It was Alma. Later on, she and I were in the same final class of the gymnasium. Alma stood out from the others because of her gentleness and posture. I was not the only one eyeing her in the gymnasium class at that time.”
He later said that when he asked for Alma’s hand in marriage, he felt so excited that he could hardly utter his lines.
“I am grateful to Alma for supporting me and I have achieved a lot thanks to her help,” Adamkus told TV3 on the occasion of the 65th anniversary of their marriage.
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