A Soviet story: mass deportation, isolation, return

ENPlans for deportations were approved in early May 1941, and the operations themselves were launched in Western Ukraine on May 22, on June 12 and 13 in Moldova, June 14 in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, and June 19 and 20 in Western Belarus—just a few days before the launch of operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the USSR by Nazi Germany on June 22. The NKVD was assisted by local authorities, members of the Communist Party in particular, whose numbers had increased after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. They had prepared lists of people to be deported—including members of former governments, higher state officials and judges, higher military personnel, former politicians, entrepreneurs, merchants, artisans, and peasants. More than 100,000 people were deported during these operations. Among them, nearly 20,000 inhabitants of Lithuania were loaded into cattle cars. Some, mostly adult men, were sent to a POW camp in Ukraine—a camp that held some of the Polish officers shot in 1940. They were quickly transferred further east, to the labor camps of the infamous Gulag—the Soviet camp administration. The wives of these men, their children, and older men were sent under equally difficult conditions to an undisclosed destination. For weeks on end they tried to guess where they were headed, peering through the doors of their wagons as the railway stations passed by. Having arrived in Siberia they were “discharged” and told they had been deported for a period of twenty years. [p. 20].