Stripped of her name, 18 year-old Sonia Shainwald went to war without basic training, without equipment, without food or any of the essentials necessary to fight the German soldiers who used her native Poland as a proving ground on their way to conquer mother Russia. Urging her family and neighbors to leave a wretched hiding place during the liquidation of their Polish ghetto in 1942, she and her parents and uncle spent a brutal winter in the Russian forests and then joined a Soviet partisan brigade, which fought back heroically against the Germans and Ukrainians.