Surviving on hope

Between Shades of Gray

Most of the western world thinks about Second World War being one fought against Nazi Germany. Even popular stories such as Schindler’s Ark do much to remind us of the oppression of Jews, but obscure the persecution of the Baltic States and the arrest and removal of their middle classes by Stalin.

Fifteen percent of the Lithuanian population perished between 1939 and 1945 with similar proportions of Estonians and Latvians slaughtered. The all-smiles photograph of Stalin with Churchill and Roosevelt at Yalta in 1943 hid the bleak reality behind the Soviet Union’s own final solution.