In this moving, first-person address, an extraordinary woman speaks about her childhood in an ethnic German Mennonite community in the Soviet Union, including the arrest of her father by Soviet police, her liberation by German forces in 1941 shortly before the remnants of her community were about to be deported to Siberia, her westward trek along with the retreating German soldiers, her terrible ordeal in the final months of the war and the immediate postwar period, and her new life in South America and, finally, in the United States.