The heroine of this powerful work, Katya, is a bright, energetic and resourceful Volga German girl, a worthy descendant of those first pioneers of the steppe we learned to know in the second volume. Katya is free to reveal, through her feminine creator, thoughts and circumstances often hidden to men. Sigrid artfully illuminates dress, colors, textures, foods and challenges as Katya embarks upon an adventurous escape from a gulag on the arctic tundra and makes her way to Fresno, California, where she reconnects with a Volga German community that had immigrated decades earlier. From Gulag to Freedom is the third volume in Sigrid Weidenweber's trilogy "The Volga Flows Forever." Catherine, the first volume, brings to life the fascinating historical character of Catherine the Great who invited her native countrymen to settle the Russian frontier. The Volga Germans, the second volume, continues the story of the German immigrants and their descendants who civilized the bleak Russian frontier of the lower Volga River Valley. They survived an unpredictable and often harsh climate and the vagaries of tsarist edicts to build a culture that was uniquely their own.