Hometown, Alaska Alaska Public Media

The night of Soviet killings of January 13, 1991 in Vilnius, Lithuania. An unarmed Lithuanian citizen stands against a Soviet tank. Wikimedia Commons image by photographer Andrius Petrulevicius, Lithuanian Central State.Svaja Worthington was only five years old in 1944 when her family walked away from their Lithuanian home in the face of Russian brutality. During World War II, Lithuania had been occupied first by the Soviet Union and then by Nazi Germany. Towards the end of the war in 1944, as the Germans were retreating, the Soviet Union reoccupied Lithuania. And, as with events in Ukraine today, there was active resistance.Some of Svaya’s relatives were taken to Soviet gulags. Her family left everything, walking behind a cart carrying their belongings, with a cow trailing behind. They spent years as refugees, finally coming to the United States — first New Jersey and then Illinois, where a relative resided. Svaya grew up there, graduated from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and went on to gradua