Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch

In 1943, ten-year-old Lida is torn away from her home in the Ukraine, separated from her little sister Larissa, and sent to a slave labor camp in Germany, but when she is moved and set to making bombs, she sees a way to strike back at the Nazis.

It is June 1941 and after the brutal rule of the Soviets the people of Krystia's small Ukrainian village are inclined to look on the German invaders as liberators; but soon the Nazis start rounding up Jewish Ukrainians, and Krystia is faced with a terrible choice--risk everything by helping her Jewish friends and neighbors to hide, or save herself and her family by doing nothing.

Despite their political differences Nyl, a young Ukrainian farmer, and Alice, a Canadian girl whose father has come to the Soviet Union, struggle to survive the famine-genocide known as the Holodomor, when the forced collectivization of the Ukrainian farms and hard winters led to mass starvation and death. Ever since the Soviet dictator, Stalin, took control of the farms in the Ukraine like the one Nyl's family lives on, there is less and less food...

"Tuan and his family survive bullets, a broken motor, and a leaking boat in the long days they spend at sea after fleeing Vietnam. A true story as told to the author by Tuan Ho. Includes family photographs and a historical note about the Vietnamese refugee crisis"--