Jonas Mekas collaborated with Andy Warhol, George Maciunas, John Lennon, and many others. In New York, he shaped the New American Cinema, but he started making films relatively late. In 1944, Mekas and his younger brother Adolfas had to flee from the Nazis because they had been distributing leaflets. They were imprisoned in a labor camp in Elmshorn for eight months. Due to the Soviet occupation, he was unable to return to his homeland of Lithuania after the war and was considered a "displaced person." He lived in DP camps in Wiesbaden and Kassel. At the end of 1949, he emigrated to New York with his brother. In his autobiography "I Had Nowhere to Go," he describes surviving in the camps and arriving in New York. Mekas tells a universal story of a refugee who can never return and whose loneliness in the new world is emblematic of the human experience.