He was born in to a large Jewish family. Dushanki's father was blinded during World War I and could not provide for the large family. Therefore, after graduating from the 6th grade, Dushanski began working. This early exposure to manual labor pushed him into communism–socialism and, in 1934, he joined the illegal Lithuanian branch of the Komsomol (Communist Union of Youth) and helped distributing underground communist publications. For such communist activities he was arrested in June 1936. First, he was jailed in a juvenile prison; later he was transferred to prisons in Šiauliai and Raseiniai. While in prison, Dushanski joined the Lithuanian Communist Party in 1938. He was released when Soviet Union occupied Lithuania in June 1940 and was given a job as an assistant security officer at the NKVD office in Telšiai. His duties included securing the Soviet Union – Nazi Germany border. He was involved in mass arrests of the "enemies of the people" and the June deportation. Conflicting witnesses testimony implicated Dushanski in the Rainiai massacre, one of the many NKVD prisoner massacres at the beginning of the German invasion of the Soviet Union. According to Dushanski, at the time he was returning from a vacation in Crimea and was attempting to evacuate his family from Šiauliai into Russia. However, the train did not leave the station and his parents and three siblings perished during the Holocaust; only his brother Jacob survived.