In my first year in seminary in Washington, D.C., I visited the Embassy of the Lithuanian Government in Exile. This government has not existed in Lithuania since 1940, when the Soviets invaded ostensibly to save that land from German invasion. In fact, however, Stalin had something else in mind. It was called degentrification, transporting masses of people from their homeland to another section of the Soviet Union, and then bringing other peoples, also degentrified, to settle in that land.

I remember listening with startled ears as a tall, thin man with an accent told us of what had happened to his country. I had never heard of such a thing. Deportation is another name for it, or exile. The feeling is dislocation, being cut off, separated. I was twenty-one or twenty-two when I heard about…