A six-year-old girl is abruptly ejected from her idyllic life in Estonia into the chaos of Hitler's collapsing Germany, where her heroic mother braves impossible odds to assure their survival. Failing to outrun the advancing Soviet troops on foot would mean a one-way trip to Stalin's Gulag.
Their desperate survival odyssey, marked by a series of uncanny serendipities, lands them in a postwar displaced persons' (DP) camp run by Americans. There, stateless and without a future, her family must find a country that will accept them as immigrants. After four years of fruitless search and dead ends, a miraculous turn of fate opens the door to a fresh start in New York, and a complete life transformation beyond anything they could have imagined.
This story won the top memoir prize at the 2014 San Francisco Writers' conference.