After World War II, Europe was divided in two parts and the state of Lithuania found itself on the eastern side of the Iron Curtain. In the 1950s, under the yoke of Stalinism, hundreds of thousands of Lithuanians were deported to gulags in the Soviet Union. Marija, an orphaned eleven-year-old girl, escapes from a transport train and sets out on a 6,000-mile trek back home, posing as a Russian and keeping her true identity secret in the face of suspicion and cruelty.