This book tells the story of Olga Kochanska, an American woman of Polish origin who resided on the eastern border of Poland in 1939, having just lost her husband, when, despite being an American citizen, she was arrested by the Soviet police. She spent the next few months in Lwów, watching the city grow daily uglier and dirtier by the day as the intruders from the east gained greater and greater control. Then in the spring of 1940, Mrs. Kochanska found herself suddenly gathered up by the Russian police and imprisoned in a railroad car, along with a band of cultured, well-to-do Jews of Lwów, for exile to Siberia, where she would suffer a harrowing experience as a prisoner for the next six months. A vivid and sensitive account of the sufferings in Poland and Siberia during the unfolding of World War II.