Eighty years ago, a targeted campaign of Soviet communist repression against the people of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania peaked with mass deportations carried out over several nights in June of 1941.
The dreaded sound of a heavy knock on the door in the middle of the night, signalled that a troika of Stalin’s henchmen were waiting to storm into the home or farm to herd families onto waiting trucks at gun point. From their homes, they were driven to central railway depots and onto waiting cattle cars, which would carry the victims off to distant Gulag slave labour camps — often never to return.
