Agate Nesaule spent her childhood in a long, nearly unbearable nightmare: her family fled its comfortable home in World War II Latvia only to be captured first by the Germans, then by brutal Russian troops. A witness to rape, torture, and executions, and estranged from her mother, Nesaule played with her sister among corpses as her family starved. Against all odds, the family eventually made it to safety in the United States. Nesaule began her new life by getting the education her mother always dreamed of.
But the trauma of war was not so easily buried. A successful professor in Wisconsin, Nesaule was secretly tormented by memories. Overcome with the shame of "not being worth feeding" and the terror of captivity, never at ease with her mother, she punished herself with an unhappy marriage and quiet self-loathing -- until she began to tell her story.