In 1921, he enrolled in the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, where in 1924 he received his Ph.D for a doctoral thesis on the relations between Lithuanian and Slavic folk songs.

However, during the Nazi occupation of the country, as an intellectual, Sruoga was arrested, imprisoned, and later deported to the Stutthof concentration camp.

Balys Sruoga was born on 2 February 1896 in the village of Baibokai [lt] (near modern-day Panevėžys), then the Kovno Governorate of the Russian Empire.

[4] As was standard at the time, before beginning official education, Sruoga attended a private secret school that was set up at his home.

From 1906 to 1914 Sruoga attended the Panevėžys real school, where he belonged to the socialist Aušrininkai society and became its leader in the city.

[7] Although reserved in nature, Sruoga became known for his literary school work;[8] he later printed poems, articles, and correspondences in newspapers such as Aušrinė, Rygos naujienos, and the Vaivorykštė magazine.

[12] In St. Petersburg, Sruoga was also acquainted with Ignas Šeinius,[13] Jurgis Baltrušaitis, Konstantin Balmont, Vyacheslav Ivanov, and Maxim Gorky.

[14] Sruoga continued translating the works of Mykolas Vaitkus, Maironis, Sofija Čiurlionienė, Ignas Šeinius, and others.

However, as military tensions between newly independent Lithuania and Poland were rising (which would culminate into the Polish–Lithuanian War), Sruoga decided to leave Vilnius and traveled to Kaunas on foot in 1919.

On 22 March 1924, Sruoga married Vanda Daugirdaitė in the village of Būgiai [lt], after which they moved to the port city Klaipėda.

Until 1940, Sruoga worked at the faculty of humanitarian sciences of the Vytautas Magnus University, where he lectured on Russian literature and the history of theater as a docent.

[30] Sruoga's best known work is the novel Forest of the Gods, based on his own life experiences as a prisoner in Stutthof concentration camp in Sztutowo, Free City of Danzig (now present-day Nowy Dwór Gdański County, Pomeranian Voivodeship, Poland), where he was sent in March 1943 together with forty-seven other Lithuanian intellectuals after the Nazis started a campaign against possible anti-Nazi agitation in occupied Lithuania.

[31] In the book, Sruoga revealed life in a concentration camp through the eyes of a man whose only way to save his life and maintain his dignity was to view everything through a veil of irony and humor, where torturers and their victims are exposed as imperfect human beings, being far removed from the false ideals of their political leaders.

Sruogas's experiences in the concentration camp were written with elements of the grotesque, where dark humor creates an image of an absurd world.

Before returning to Vilnius, Sruoga spent another two months in a military field hospital in Lauenburg and in Toruń, in a temporary camp where ex-prisoners were checked to ensure that there were no war criminals or agents subordinate to Nazi Germany in hiding.

The authorities' refusal to publish Sruogas's novel,[35] weak health resulting from his time in the concentration camp,[36] as well as the psychological burden of not seeing his daughter and wife who were migrating abroad,[37] led to his death on 16 October 1947.