Hello and thank you for downloading witness on the BBC World Service with me,

Dina Newman. Today we are going back to the end of the Second World War.

As the Soviet's Red Army reconquered territory it had lost to the Nazi invaders, it began the repatriation

of hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens who had ended up outside the USSR during the

war.

But as I have been hearing from one family, many people refused to return. It's spring 1945 and the days of Nazi Germany are nearly over.

Tanya Vanov, originally from Soviet-Belle Russia, is living in a Nazi labor camp near Frankfurt,

when one day she is stopped by a group of Soviet soldiers outside the camp. They were

they were very, very young.

They were very young.

They said, stop, where are you going? I said, I am going to the camp. I live there with my

baby and my mom. Turned out, these soldiers are taking over Germany and were under orders to take any Russian

they meet, put them on the train and immediately send them back to Russia. But I started crying and they let me go.

So did you see these soldiers as your liberators or your enemies ready to deport you.

I didn't think any of that.

I simply thought,

he is a bunch of attractive young men.

They are so young and so good looking, but we have to flee because we are not going back to Russia.

Now 93, Tanya lives in Sydney, Australia. She spoke to me on Skype in Russian, with her daughter

Tamara by her side speaking English. Tamara loves her mother's stories and they connect her to her parents native land, Bella Russia.

It is, it's a big part of our lives and it's my roots.

You know, if I hear Russian music or whatever it makes me cry. Daniel's story began in the summer of 1941 when Nazi Germany launched the

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