When the German army arrived in Lithuania in 1941, many Jewish families fled but Margaret's family stayed. Her younger brother was away at a children's holiday camp and the family could not leave without him. Margaret's father was arrested and never returned. Her and her mother were forced into a slave labor camp where Margaret met Joseph Kagan, her future husband. Joseph refused to accept the conditions of their camp and convinced Margaret to sneak away with him and hide in the attic of a local factory. There they hid for nine months unable to make a sound during the day out of fear of being caught until the soviet troops reached Kaunas and they were freed. Margaret later learned that her father was killed in one of the earliest massacres of the war and her mother had committed suicide in a concentration camp.