In 1939, Michael Krupka was preparing to take his final vows in a Jesuit seminary in the southeast of Poland, unaware that his life was about to change in the most unimaginable way.  Several months later, after absconding from the seminary to play his part in the valiant yet doomed attempt to resist Hitler's invasion, he was arrested in Soviet-occupied eastern Poland and accused of spying.  His living nightmare began with interrogation and torture in Moscow's notorious Lubianka prison, and continued in the Pechora Gulag, where he faced a cruel and harsh environment in which most prisoners were worked and starved to death within a year.  Yet, unbelievably, he escaped, and in the chaos following the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union made the gruelling journey from Siberia to safety in Afganistan.  

Michael Krupa's is a truly remarkable story of survival againt all the odds and illustrates with chilling clarity the brutality and terror which characterized Stalin's Russia.