deportations from ukraine

It is June 1941 and after the brutal rule of the Soviets the people of Krystia's small Ukrainian village are inclined to look on the German invaders as liberators; but soon the Nazis start rounding up Jewish Ukrainians, and Krystia is faced with a terrible choice--risk everything by helping her Jewish friends and neighbors to hide, or save herself and her family by doing nothing.

When Nadia arrives in Canada in 1950 with Marusia, the woman she calls mother, she is glad to finally be out of the displaced persons camp where she has lived for five years, but troubled by confused memories of World War II; she speaks Ukrainian, but she seems to remember living with a German Nazi family who called her by a different name--and as she tries to settle into the Canadian-Ukrainian community of Brantford she is haunted by one question: who is she, and where was she stolen from.

Luka, a Ukrainian boy working in a slave labor camp, plays dead after an explosion at the factory and escapes, eventually joining a resistance group that opposes both the Nazis and the Soviets, and through the danger of the guerilla fighting he has two overriding goals--find out if his parents are still alive, and reunite with Lida, a girl who was a friend in the labor camp.

In 1943 ten-year-old Lida is torn away from her home in the Ukraine, separated from her little sister Larissa, and sent to a slave labor camp in Germany, but when she is moved and set to making bombs she sees a way to strike back at the Nazis.