The Red Army, after pushing back the Nazis, invaded Lithuania in June of ’44, just five years after the Nazis marched past the bakery. Two weeks before Vilnius was occupied, her father took her and her brother onto a train heading west into Germany, where they would hopefully sneak into occupied France, then perhaps London. Though the Germans might have had plans to exterminate them eventually, the Communists posed a more immediate threat, seizing private property and splitting entire families, deporting them into Stalin’s working camps in the nether realms of the Soviet Union, many of whom
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