It's especially cold and snowy, that last winter of the Second World
War. With the Red Army expected to thunder through the Third Reich at
any moment, a sense of doom pervades Katya's world where everyone is
expected to believe in the Nazi's final victory. At the end of January,
1945, East Prussian civilians are finally given permission to flee.
Having spent the war years working at an ammunition factory, Katya joins
her two sisters, and thousands of others, trekking with overloaded
wagons along crowded, snowy roads. They're trying to reach ships waiting
along the Baltic coast. They don't make it. Instead, Katya's separated
from her sisters and forced to take a long and shameful journey back
into the Soviet Union, a country that once labelled her kulak and
destroyed her family home. Katya's dragged into a labour camp deep in
the Ural Mountains. Here, with her Russian language skills from
childhood, she's elevated to a leadership position as a starosta. It's a
position fraught with danger as she navigates the two enemy worlds.
Katya learns to eat crow, to find love, and to believe in herself.
