Juliana Starosolska was taken by the Stalinists from her parents' home in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv and deported in a sealed boxcar to a distant and primitive outpost in Siberian Kazakhstan. In "Woman in Exile, " she records her ordeals in a series of vignettes that capture the horrific, the humane, and even the occasionally humorous aspects of her experience.

Her father was arrested by the Stalinists and sent to a forced labor camp deep in Russian Siberia, where he died less than two years later. In the spring of 1940, the rest of his family, who had remained behind in...