Ann Szedlecki was a fourteen-year-old when the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939. She elected to embark on what she saw as a great adventure and fled to the Soviet Union with her older brother, Shoel, hoping to return for the rest of her family later. Instead, she ended up spending most of the next six and a half years alone in the Soviet Union, trying to endure in the harsh conditions of northern Siberia under the Communist regime.