Thousands of stories have been told about the deprivation and horror of the Second World War, but there is one aspect that has received comparatively little attention: the story of those who lost the same war twice, the people of Germany. Not the military, the Nazis, or the government itself, but the villagers, the grandparents, the wives, and the children—the people who had little more control over their future than did the victims of the concentration camps.

The Third Reich of Germany, in its corruption and despotism, subjected many of its own people to terrible abuse before it began to crumble, abandoning them to a new kind of holocaust. Those who lived in the western part of the country had the hope, at least, of rebuilding lives for themselves after 1945, but those in the east who came under Russian control soon found that the struggle had only begun.

In this book, Liane Guddat Brown recounts sixteen months of her life as a young German girl under Russian occupation in an area that is now part of Poland. Those in her little family were the last representatives of a town of five thousand residents. All others had been murdered, forced to flee, or starved to death. Despite brutal treatment and harsh conditions, the Guddats survived, escaped, and reunited their family, bringing with them to the free world a compelling story of God's marvelous grace.