Without warning, Soviet secret police crash in their door and drag fifteen-year-old Lina Vikas, her parents, and her younger brother off.
It is 1939, and Stalin is deporting millions of Lithuanians to the frozen land in Siberia. Lina's father is sent to a death camp, while Lina, her mother, and her brother are pushed onto packed cattle trains. They are forced to endure unrelenting hunger as they travel the long miles to the brutal and frigid Siberian labor camp. Twenty million Lithuanians will die.
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In a hidden journal, Lina risks everything to document, with words and drawings, what they endured. She writes about the impossible choices they are forced to make, the worry over family members separated, the constant threats, the deprivation, the desperation, and the will to survive. Lina writes of her attempts to communicate with her father and her refusal to prostitute herself or sign untrue confessions. She writes about her first love, about her hopes, and about her dreams.
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