Tom Appelbaum

In 1942, Red Army officer Nikolai Kiselyov receives orders to evacuate over 200 Jewish women, children, and elderly men facing brutality and death in Nazi-occupied Belarus. These exhausted, starving, terrified and bereaved people, deeply scarred by the horrors they have witnessed, must trek hundreds of kilometers along forest paths to regain hope of survival and faith in the future.

A once successful novelist tries to revive his fading career by launching a highly inventive scam. He recruits a reckless actress and trains her to assume the somber identity of a lit Masters student. Their lives will alter forever.