At the end of World War Two, in a beautiful alpine valley in Austria, an event occurred that has been variously described as a tragedy, a betrayal, and even a war crime. Cossacks and their followers, massed by the thousands around Lienz expecting to be given the freedom to continue their more than 25-year struggle against Soviet oppression, were instead brutally betrayed into the hands of those oppressors. This blending of fiction and fact tells the story of one group of Cossacks caught in the horror of that day. Their story starts from the "Great War" and continues through to Perestroika. In it, the reader will relive the Russian Civil War, the prisons of the Gulag, the loneliness of expatriate life, the famines of dekulakization, and the horrors, but also the hopes, of life under the Wehrmacht. It is a story of tragedy and redemption.