What to do if your family is far from home, away from everything familiar and dear, and you don't even have a Christmas tree? You can decorate a wormwood branch: cut fringe from an old torn book, make little lambs, hens, horses from dough. It might be black and white, but very beautiful! Five-year-old Marijhe knows: under such a tree in the morning there will definitely be a gift because she behaved well, almost well, all year. Christmas remains a celebration always—even on unfamiliar Siberian land, where Marijhe and her family were sent at the start of the war. Childhood memory only keeps fragmentary recollections, bits of parental explanations about how and why it happened. The heavy march of history is muffled, the girl barely hears it—and remembers quiet moments of joy, instances of everyday sorrow, fragile images that at first glance say nothing about the 1940s era. Marijhe, her sisters Mina and Lilia, their mother, Aunt Yozefina with her son Theodor, friends and neighbors of Rovnopol—are Russian Germans. And although they, as their father explained to the girls, are "good Germans," not "fascists," they are forbidden to live further in their native places: what if they side with the enemy? Whatever the trial the move is for the family, kind people help them—such people exist in any locality, any people, at any time.