On 14 June 1941, Vanaga was deported to Siberia's Krasnoyarsk Oblast together with her eight-year-old son Alnis. Her husband, Aleksandrs, was separated from the family and sent to a Gulag camp in the Urals, where he was executed in 1942. She returned to Soviet-occupied Latvia in 1957. She worked as a herder in the kolhozs in the vicinity of Cēsis, where she started collecting local histories, stories, documents, and photos.