"The enemies of the people must be torn out by the roots," read a sign Hilda Vitzthum observed in a public building shortly before her arrest in 1938. Her husband, a Russian engineer employed in the construction of a huge steelworks in western Siberia, was an "enemy of the people," a member of the educated classes that Stalin saw as a threat to his regime. Not only would he be a victim of Stalin s madness; his whole family must be destroyed. Even though Hilda was an Austrian and, like her husband, a loyal Communist, her children were taken from her and she was condemned to forced labor....