In an intimate narrative, Braun ushers us into the life of one extended Mennonite family -- in particular the lives of her father and grandfather, living under the terror of Stalin, and later, under the military expansion of Hitler's Nazi Lebensraum in the Ukraine. In a memoir that is historically faithful to documents, letters, old photographs and personal testimony, Braun offers a lyrical second-generation witness to her family members and to all other Canadians who have suffered displacement in history's disasters, and whose obscure stories must be told.