Stolen Years

Anna is just seventeen when the Gestapo snatches her from her native village in Poland. She forms part of a group of young people forced into slave labour at a remote farm in Austria, under the ever-watchful eye of their ‘owner’, the despotic Herr Holtzman. For five long years, Anna and her friends are subjected to relentless hard labour and appalling living conditions. Their miserable existence is punctuated by frequent incidents of Nazi cruelty, tragedy and death. Anna’s enforced separation from her beloved Michal is the hardest blow to bear. Finally, the day of liberation arrives. Will she be reunited for good with Michal? Will she see her lost friends again, those who were her substitute family during her time in this hostile environment? Will she be able to return to her mother, whom she has so desperately missed? While Poland’s future was decided at the end of the war by the Big Three: Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin, they couldn’t begin to make the personal decisions that Anna now has to make. They’re decisions that she never even imagined during her years of slavery, when her only desire was to return home.