Guest Post: Last Train to Freedom by Deborah Swift
- Archaeolibrarian
- 6 days ago
- 4 min read
Book details:
Book Title: Last Train to Freedom
Series: n/a
Author: Deborah Swift
Publication Date: 8th May 2025
Publisher: HQDigital
Pages: 361
Any Triggers:WW2, mild violence
@authordeborahswift @cathie.dunn1 @thecoffeepotbookclub
@deborahswiftauthor @thecoffeepotbookclub
1940. As Soviet forces storm Lithuania, Zofia and her brother Jacek must flee to survive.
A lifeline appears when Japanese consul Sugihara offers them visas on one condition: they must deliver a parcel to Tokyo. Inside lies intelligence on Nazi atrocities, evidence so explosive that Nazi and Soviet agents will stop at nothing to possess it.
Pursued across Siberia on the Trans-Siberian Express, Zofia faces danger at every turn, racing to expose the truth as Japan edges closer to allying with the Nazis. With the fate of countless lives hanging in the balance, can she complete her mission before time runs out?
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The WW2 Soviet Invasion that crushed the soul from Lithuania
In the summer of 1940, the Lithuanian city of Kaunas was known for its vibrant intellectual scene, strong civic institutions, and one of the most dynamic Jewish communities in Eastern Europe. But in June of that year, as the Red Army marched into Lithuania, everything changed. I enjoy writing about moments of great change, and it seemed to me that this was similar to the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Online research - The Nazi/Soviet agreement
To get background I conducted a lot of online research which involved wading through details of agreements made between the Soviets and the Germans. The Soviet Union supposedly invaded Lithuania for security and ‘protection,’ following a secret protocol in the 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact—a non-aggression treaty between the Nazis in Germany and the Soviet Union.
Books are my main form of research, and I probably spend more time reading non-fiction than fiction these days. My reading led me to find out that though the Soviet entry into Lithuania was not met with any military resistance, it was far from peaceful. Within days, Soviet authorities dismantled the democratic government, arrested key officials, and forced the president, Antanas Smetona, into exile. A puppet government was installed under Justas Paleckis, and by August 3, Lithuania was fully annexed into the USSR as the ‘Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic.’
Kaunas, the capital at the time, was among the first cities to feel the crushing weight of Soviet control, and the events of that time were recorded by many in their memoirs. These I was able to access through academic websites such as Jstor which had snippets of them in translation. The memoirs tell the stories of rapes, hangings and shootings of teachers and journalists.
The Death of Culture
One of the Soviet regime’s first targets was the Lithuanian intelligentsia—writers, educators, clergy, military officers, and civil servants, many of whom were nationalists or held anti-communist views, and were seen as threats to Soviet authority and ideology.
Mass deportations happened on June 14, 1941, when the NKVD (Soviet secret police) rounded up over 17,000 Lithuanians and deported them to Siberia, the Arctic, and Kazakhstan. Among them were university professors, doctors, engineers, and clergy, many of whom perished in forced labour camps.
During the June 1941 deportations, thousands of Lithuanian Jews—many of them professionals and intellectuals—were sent to Siberian labour camps, or gulags. Ironically, some of these deportees would survive the Holocaust because they were no longer in Lithuania when the Nazis invaded just days later.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s book The Gulag Archipelago helped me get a sense of this kind of landscape and the Russian mindset.
This systematic destruction of Lithuania’s intellectual class aimed to sever the country’s cultural memory and make way for the Sovietization of society. It was aided by supporters of the communist regime and I was able to access many pictures of this ‘Sovetisation’.
The Plight of Jewish refugees
Though the Soviet regime did not target Jews explicitly for their religion or ethnicity—as the Nazis did—many Jews still suffered under the Soviets due to their economic status and political independence. Jewish newspapers, schools, and organizations were shut down under Soviet rule. The NKVD viewed any form of independent Jewish political life as a threat.
The Soviet invasion of Lithuania, and its waves of arrest, imprisonment, and terror, decimated the country’s elite and tore apart its centuries-old Jewish community. Kaunas, the heart of the nation, would soon become a place of arrests, executions, and ultimately, genocide, because eight days later the Nazis would also invade Lithuania.
In Vilnius, the ‘Jerusalem of Lithuania’ as it was once affectionately called, most of the 41,000 Jewish inhabitants were murdered by the Germans and their helpers.
Last Train to Freedom tells the story of some of the refugees who did escape Soviet persecution and the subsequent Nazi invasion. They travelled via the Trans-Siberian Express – a journey of 6000 miles.
Deborah Swift is the English author of twenty historical novels, including Millennium Award winner Past Encounters, and The Poison Keeper the novel based around the life of the legendary poisoner Giulia Tofana. The Poison Keeper won the Wishing Shelf Readers Award for Book of the Decade. Recently she has completed a secret agent series set in WW2, the first in the series being The Silk Code.
Deborah used to work as a set and costume designer for theatre and TV and enjoys the research aspect of creating historical fiction, something she loved doing as a scenographer. She likes to write about extraordinary characters set against a background of real historical events. Deborah lives in England on the edge of the Lake District, an area made famous by the Romantic Poets such as Wordsworth and Coleridge.
Author Links:
Website: www.deborahswift.com
Twitter https://twitter.com/swiftstory
Amazon Author Page: http://author.to/DeborahSwift
Tour hosted by: The Coffee Pot Book Club
Thank you so much for hosting my post and for taking the time to lay it out so beautifully!💐
Thank you for hosting Deborah Swift today, with such a fascinating guest post linked to her riveting new novel, Last Train to Freedom.
Take care,
Cathie xx
The Coffee Pot Book Club