During World War II, Peretz evacuated his family to Tashkent, Uzbekistan. A few years after the war's end, around 1947, Olga was taken to Kiev, where she began studying at the Institute of Art History. In 1949, the Soviet Union began a wave of Jewish purges, wherein the NKVD arrested members of the Anti-Fascist Committee, including her father. Peretz was executed in 1952 for the crime of Jewish nationalism and his family was exiled to Kazakhstan to serve a ten-year sentence as enemies of the state. For two years they were shuttled between northern Kazakhstan and Abakan, in the Khakassia region of southern Siberia.