Jash, Mary and their six children live in a quiet street in the small village Altonau, the largest colony of Mennonites Sagradowka. Altonau is a tree-lined village near the Black Sea in contemporary Ukraine. Ingultez The river flows nearby. A Cossack big hill at the end of the main street is a reminder to former residents. Green Hills offers a year-round playground for children. Watermelon, fruit trees and crops grown in fertile soil. Friends, brothers, cousins, grandparents and in the surrounding villages shares meals and good times. The family works on their farm, worshiped in a nearby church, the children attend the local school. But in 1929, everything changes. You know, to leave them. Jash Liza's sister and her husband Franz barges quickly abandoned in the middle of the night. Jasch and Maria hesitate. Frail elderly parents can not be left behind. Later, twelve hours, the family packed and ready to leave for Canada. 'm too late. The border was closed. Armed guards to prevent their departure. Jash is immediately arrested for trying to leave. He is held in a local jail cell for eight months. Mary and children are homeless. They are now the enemies of the new Marxist state. Labeled as kulaks, were deprived of their nationality, housing, goods and chattels. They wander from one place to another? Kulak is illegal at home. Eight months later (June 6, 1931), the whole family? Parents and children (the oldest 17 and the youngest of three years) were arrested. With just a few hours in advance, wraps a piece of wood hand-Maria. Only a pillow and a blanket for two people, several spoons, forks, cups, bowls, and some clothes are not allowed. Packaged in a barn with other prisoners for three days and three nights, the family is united with Jash. The sixteen, joins his brother Aaron arrested in place of his father's fragile. Are all herded into cattle cars to the station. For nine days, living alone, no toilets, no water for washing and a daily ration of thin soup, rolls the train north. Stops in a prison camp in the northern Urals. The whole family is in a prison, the prisoner on a unprecedented scale and brutality. Space 5a? X 5a? In a three-story cabin is your home? the piece of wood from their herds to travel alone. Sound freely between the thin walls. Fleas and lice are their companions. Floor to ceiling, sleeping platforms, set the size of her room. For a ration of bread, Mary, her husband and children working in industrial zones, Stalin: forests, mines, railroads and foundries. Work dominates their lives. Older children, Lisa (17) and Peter (15), are sent on a journey of three days of sawn timber. Are wet day and night. No change of clothes and shoes that use the leaves, bark and cloth. Daughter, Marietta (13) works at an undisclosed location and "do not come home for five days. Tina (12), is three miles every day to shovel the waste into a smelting iron ore. Jash father sees his sons stagger "up to their bellies in the snow – and then you have the 5-km walk. And then a layer of working 10 hours without pay. "reasons for food began in the first few letters of the father Jasch. Letters and packages from Altonau and Canada are in the camp. The trickle of aid is just enough to keep the prisoners alive hungry. Milk powder, salt, barley and dry beans, sometimes come in packs. The date range in years, the hope of freedom disappears. Jash and his son Peter survived. Mary and the other children against disease, hunger and brutality. But somehow survive. Finally in 1956 were released from detention camps in the Gulag. But that's not freedom. Are forbidden to return to former home, forbidden to leave Russia, and prohibited from exercising their religion. Without property and without the employability, Maria and her surviving children, start a new life, first in the Urals, and finally in Tokmak, Kyrgyzstan (next to China). They are working to get a cow, chickens, and a small garden. But their former home Altonau lined in trees is wrapped now a memory.