The memoir covers more than two years of exile in Germany during the last years of World War II, the global military conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945. At that time multitudes of people were displaced by war. We were among those who, fleeing the approaching Soviet army, left Lithuania on October of 1944 and stayed in Germany until January of 1947, when we boarded a ship for America.
WWII touched our corner of the world in 1940, after Nazi Germany invaded western Poland. To restrain the Nazi aggression, France and the British Commonwealth declared war on Germany two days after the invasion. In turn the Soviet Union (USSR) launched its own invasion into eastern Poland, and soon thereafter the Germans and the Soviets signed a secret treaty. In that treaty, among other provisions "in mutual assistance" the Soviets were to station troops in Lithuania. Consequently in 1940 the Soviets' Red Army invaded Lithuania.
That same year the Nazis broke the treaty, declared war on the Soviet Union, invaded the neutral Baltic States (Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia) and marched into the USSR. By 1944 the Germans were losing the war on the eastern and western fronts and the Soviet army, on the way to Germany, re-entered Lithuania and occupied Latvia and Estonia as well. The war ended with an armistice in 1945. In a conference held in Yalta (Crimea) the victors—American President Franklin D. Roosevelt, England's Prime Minister Winston Churchill and the Soviet Communist leader Joseph Stalin—divided eastern Europe among themselves. The Baltic states fell to the Soviets, the conference legitimizing the occupation of our countries for the next 50 years. Lithuania regained its independence only in 1990, when the Soviet Union collapsed.
Our country of 3.5 million people, located at the crossroads of eastern and western Europe, had been victimized many times before. Even Napoleon marched to Russia through Lithuania and came back by the same route. During WWII our nation suffered three consecutive invasions: first the Soviets, then the Nazis, then the Soviets again.