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Juliana Zarchi was born in Lithuania in 1938 into a family with parents of different nationalities. Her father, Lithuanian of Jewish origin and her mother was German. Lithuania was soon annexed by the Soviet Union, and then, when the Third Reich turned on its former ally and attacked USSR in 1941, the country was occupied by the Nazis. As a half-Jew, barely at the age of three, Juliana was sent to the Kaunas ghetto and forced to stay there for several months. As the Soviet army re-entered Lithuania, mother and daughter hoped they would no longer have to fear for their lives. Instead, they were both deported to Tajikistan in Central Asia as part of a purge of ethnic Germans. They were stigmatized by the locals as ‘Fascists’ and forced to live and work in dire conditions.