One of the tragic episodes of the last war was the forcible repatriation by the allies of 50,000 Cossacks, men, women and children, to Stalin's Russia in 1945. Some were prisoners of war in Nazi Germany, others were refugees from Stalin's communist regime. They were at the mercy of the allies, and at the Yalta Conference of February 1945, Churchill and Roosevelt had effectively signed their death warrant. Between 1944 and 1947 these people were forced to travel back to the country from which they had fled, often at rifle and bayonet point, clubbed and herded onto the trains. Many committed suicide rather than face Stalin's revenge. Eyewitnesses described scenes of terror and total desperation. For many years, this secret of the last days of World War II was hidden by the allies. This book descibes what Solzhenitsyn called "the war's last secret". It contains a new afterword from the author as well as inclusion of the afterword which appeared in a Russian edition of this book, by Victor Nekrasov.
