Ten days before the start of the Great Patriotic War, strangers armed with weapons burst into the home of ordinary peasants. Without explanation, Vasya and his family from Bukovina (formerly Romania) are deported to the Far North. Vasya's granddaughter, Anna Rakhmanko, learns of this tragic episode in her family history only many years later from her great-aunt Lyuba, who survived the exile as a child. Lyuba recounts the fates and hardships of those forced to end up in the far north of Siberia and tries to understand why they were forced to live for so long with the stigma of being enemies of the people.