Writing to her brother's wife Liese in Carlyle, Saskatchewan, Maria tries to save space on the scrap of paper she shares with her husband Jasch. Small handwriting, upside-down writing and using initials for names save valuable space. The techniques might also outwit the prison guard who will read this letter.

Born in 1891, Maria Goosen was 20 years old when she married a Mennonite man (Jasch Regehr) six years older. Their daughter Liese, was born one year later. Living near parents, siblings and friends in Altonau, her future appeared secure and predictable. Nothing was further from the truth.

Arrested with her husband and six children, and surviving 26 years of imprisonment, Maria struggles to maintain a sense of domestic normalcy. Mending, cooking, cleaning, walking to find food, caring for her sick husband and worrying about her children consumes her. After her husband's death, another horror is enacted. She is accused of burning 70 hectares of forest and poisoning 200 cows in the village of Kolschim (only 20 cows existed in their village). On February 16, 1938 she is sent north to a crowded confinement cell. Interrogated nightly, beaten and starved, it is a miracle she survived. After 18 months, a sympathetic prison guard frees Maria. But she never fully recovers. Maria dies in foreign Kyrgyzstan in 1976, never being able to return to her tree-lined home village.