Narrated by Allan Corduner.

Samuel Birger tells the harrowing story of what it was like for his  family to flee from their shtetl of Jonava as the Germans sped through  the country, and more than a few Lithuanians joined in what would become  an orgy of killing. The Birger family fled by horse and wagon, by foot,  and then by train—until weeks later, they arrived in Tatarstan. Living  in wretched poverty, Samuel’s grandmother starved to death while he and  his three younger brothers foraged for jobs and food on collective  farms.

On June 22, 1941, Adolf Hitler unleashed Operation Barbarossa, the largest land invasion in history. Intent on destroying the Soviet Union, over 3 million German soldiers streamed through eastern Poland, the Baltic states and into the Soviet Union itself. By the time the Soviet Army had retreated, retrenched and retook their lands, millions of Soviet soldiers and civilians would perish and tens of thousands of villages and towns burned to the ground.