When Nadia arrives in Canada in 1950 with Marusia, the woman she calls mother, she is glad to finally be out of the displaced persons camp where she has lived for five years, but troubled by confused memories of World War II; she speaks Ukrainian, but she seems to remember living with a German Nazi family who called her by a different name--and as she tries to settle into the Canadian-Ukrainian community of Brantford she is haunted by one question:...

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.

Maria and her friend Nathan flee their Nazi-occupied Ukrainian town, hoping to earn wages and avoid starvation as foreign workers in Austria, but they are quickly separated and Maria waits out the war as a farm laborer.

After being adopted from Vietnam by a loving family in Canada, Tuyet undergoes a series of operations to correct her foot, which was turned inward by polio, so that she may someday walk, run, and play like other children.