In 1941, fifteen-year-old Lina, her mother, and brother are pulled from their Lithuanian home by Soviet guards and sent to Siberia, where her father is sentenced to death in a prison camp while she fights for her life, vowing to honor her family and the thousands like hers by burying her story in a jar on Lithuanian soil. Based on the author's family, includes a historical note.

"I went to get the letters for our friends, and couldn't help but feel a little envious, I didn't expect anything for myself. And suddenly-there was my name, and, as if it was alive, your handwriting." In 1946, after five years as a prisoner-first as a Soviet POW in Nazi concentration camps, then as a deportee (falsely accused of treason) in the Arctic Gulag-twenty-nine-year-old Lev Mishchenko unexpectedly received a letter from Sveta, the sweetheart...

Twenty-six years ago, Shin Dong-hyuk was born inside Camp 14, one of five sprawling political prisons in the mountains of North Korea. This is the gripping, terrifying story of his escape from this no-exit prison-- to freedom in South Korea.

Describes how 350 American POWs captured during the Battle of the Bulge were singled out by the Nazis because they were Jews or looked like Jews, and transported to a concentration camp in Germany, where they were put to work as slave labor