One of the Fifteen Million

One of the Fifteen Million, first published in 1952, is Ukrainian Nicholas Prychodko's sobering account of his arrest, imprisonment, torture, and eventual exile to Siberia by the Soviet government in the late 1930s. As the author states, his offense was "thinking free thoughts in a slave state." In a near-miracle, his mother traveled to Moscow and the Kremlin, and was able to win a pardon for her son from a sympathetic official. Making his way back to the Ukraine, Prychodko found work as a teacher, but again facing arrest, he decides to go into hiding rather than face years of hard labor in the Siberian gulag. In a strange twist of fate, the approaching German army in 1941 proved to be his salvation, and the author begins a journey to freedom in Canada.