Anna is a bright eighteen-year-old girl, a member of a happy family and has a bright future ahead of her. Then her world is shattered when the Soviet Union forcibly annexes her tiny homeland of Latvia in the summer of 1940. A year later, it is destroyed and is forced to live by her wits. Her only hope is to somehow find her brother, who is abroad, and the young man in her life who is also lost in these brutal crosscurrents of history. Her only dream is to reach the faraway golden land of Canada. Thus, begins Anna's incredible odyssey to freedom.