Babushka's Journey: The Dark Road to Stalin's Wartime Camps

Babushka's Journey is the record of Marcel Krueger's grandmother Cilly's journey from the snow-covered battlefields of East Prussia in January 1945 to the Soviet labor camps in the Urals, where she spent five years before returning to Germany. Chasing the sights, sounds, and voices of past and present along this route, Krueger describes two different journeys that follow the same path. As he stumbles through the bars of present-day Poland and dreams on the bunk beds of the Trans-Siberian railway, Krueger forges an authentic retelling of his Babushka's tragic yet hopeful story, discovering that her journey reflects tens of thousands of similar personal histories, which continue to haunt Germany, Poland and Russia today. Following the tracks of his Babushka into her vanished homeland of East Prussia and to the labor camps of the Soviet Union, Marcel Krueger has interwoven contemporary landscape and family history into an poignant and evocative travel memoir. Not just one grandmother's World War II story, it is also Eastern Europe's story.