Valentins Trojans remembers the marauding bands of Red Army soldiers going from farmhouse to farmhouse in his rural Latvia, looting watches, shoes, and clothing.
Harijs Ruks recalls being interrogated by a sadistic Soviet officer who kicked him brutally with steel-toed boots.
And Elza Burkite recollects how occupying Russian forces seized a young mother, whose son had vanished into the Latvian forests to join up with anti-Soviet partisans.
"Do you know what they did to that mother? They tied ropes around her arms and lit them. They burned her, tortured her in many ways to force her to talk. But the mother said, 'I don't know.' And she lost her mind," Burkite said in an oral history provided to RFE/RL by the Museum of the Occupation of Latvia.
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