She is on her knees, leaning over a rough wooden trunk. Her hair falls over her eyes – the ribbons too torn to hold the blonde strands. She tries to focus. The noise distracts her and her baby brother bumps her elbow. The pencil is dull and the thin paper tears easily. "Dear Aunt Liese" ... two men below her are fighting and her father is coughing. "I really do not like writing letters. Our Papa is so sick he can no longer get up. If our dear Papa should die what will become of us?"

What is happening? Where is this little girl? Why is she in this noisy, crowded place writing on a wooden trunk? Why is her father so sick? Where is Aunt Liese?

When she is arrested with her family for crimes against the state in 1931, little Lena is nine years old. She too is guilty and sentenced to prison in Stalin’s Gulag.

Some of Lena’s surroundings appear ordinary – almost "normal", but this is another normality that is far more unpleasant. Lena’s prison camp has a doctor, a store and post office. But behind the façade of normality, Lena and her sisters scavenge for potato peelings in the garbage heap behind the officers’ quarters. Prison guards read her letter which can only be sent to locations inside the Soviet Union. Wherever she walks, she is watched by guards with dogs. The doctor (if he agrees to see her) does not practice the Hippocratic Oath.

Yet leaning over the wooden trunk in the cramped barrack, her three-year old brother bumping her arm, Lena writes a letter to Aunt Liese. The large, carefully crafted script of a young child bears witness to Lena’s age. At nine years old, her childhood innocence has been shattered. Her father is dying and she is hungry. Her "school" is not like those in her home village. These are the "schools" where the children of imprisoned kulaks are re-educated; where a new ideology replaces their former values; where the NKVD (Soviet police) monitors every move. It is in this school where Lena is refused food while she watches privileged children eat. It is here that Lena is questioned: Do your parents criticize communism? – Do they write letters? – Who do they write to? – Do they pray? It is in this place that Lena and her classmates are told to bid farewell to their mothers who are accused of heinous crimes.

Although Lena was released from prison camp with her surviving siblings in 1956, she was only liberated in 1989 when she left Russia. With her husband Jacob Dirksen, her daughter Ludmila, and two granddaughters she finally lives in freedom in Cologne, Germany.