Between 1940 and 1944, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia were caught in a brutal tug of war between Hitler and Stalin, with successive occupations deepening the social and emotional mutilation inflicted by the previous one. Warfare, deportations, prison camps, mass executions, the horrors of the Jewish Holocaust, forced emigration and flight, the intimidation of survivors, all ravaged the some six million people living in this region. Only in the 1990s, after the re-establishment of independence, could the survivors and their descendants even begin to study the nature and consequences of that grim decade when they could not control their own history.
Alfred Erich Senn
is professor emeritus of history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he has taught since 1961.
