With Germany’s invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, World War II began. Shortly after, on September 17, 1939, Russia attacked Poland under a secret pact with Germany to divvy up Poland.
At four o’clock in the morning on February 10, 1940, Janina Ślarzynska and her five-year-old daughter, Mira, were taken by Soviet secret police from their small family farm in eastern Poland and sent to Siberia with hundreds of thousands of others. So began their odyssey of hunger, disease, cunning survival, desperate escape across a continent, and new love amidst terrible circumstances.
Arrested and imprisoned in Kozelsk by the Soviets, Lieutenant Solecki narrowly escaped death among over 20,000 Polish officers and intellectuals murdered by the Soviets in the infamous Katyń Forest massacres.