refugees was announced on 30 December, namely “On the Procedure for Acquisition of USSR Citizenship for War Refugees from the Former State of Poland”. Refugees were required to sign a declaration to “renounce Polish citizenship forever, to never seek to support Polish independence, and to agree to be a loyal Soviet citizen”. On 15 February 1941, the government in exile in London sent a note of protest regarding the new law. Reportedly, 50 per cent of refugees refused to accept Soviet citizenship,354 and 2,250 persons were arrested for this reason.
The plight of refugees, as well as of local Jews deemed useless by the new authorities, was sealed by mass arrests on 14–23 June 1941. On 25 April 1941, the Lithuanian NKVD issued a directive specifying which categories of people should be arrested, and which – “only” deported. It became the basis for the lists of future prisoners drawn up in individual districts by early June. In Lithuania, there were about 30,000 people listed in total (including about 7,000 Jews), 7,600 in the district of Vilna (on 14–18 June), and 2,200 in the city itself. Lithuanians mentioned later that 60,000 people were arrested, while the Germans claimed there were 40,000; some of the detainees were killed in evacuated prisons of Berezwecz (1,500), Wilejka (500), and Prowieniszki.355
The situation of the Jews under Soviet rule was complicated. A large por-tion of the Jewish population, especially the youth, responded extremely positively to the new regime. Leftist sympathies among Jewish intellectuals had had a long tradition. Before the war, they were mainly activists and sympathisers of MOPR and Kultur-Lige; the Communist Party itself, however, did not have many supporters. The new authorities were looking for specialists and serious consequences were threatened for refusal to cooperate, so many former supporters were forcibly incorporated into the mechanisms of power. In the Central Committee of the Communist Party, five out of twenty-one members were Jews. Up to 51 per cent of civil servants employed in the ministries of health, of trade and industry were Jewish.
In the Parliament, however, they had only four representatives out of 79 deputies.
