In 1979, Galina Cherny and her husband Yan submitted a single form. That application was a declaration. There was no going back. One piece of luggage. Stripped of citizenship. Abused at the border by Soviet soldiers. Suspended between two worlds.

Last Train to Freedom is the true story of a Jewish girl born into a patriotic military family in Soviet-era Ukraine, where being Jewish determined where you could study, where you could work, and what you dared to say aloud. It is a love story that defied an empire, a Jewish family memoir, and an intimate portrait of a young couple who risked imprisonment to flee the USSR, told by the woman who lived it.

From the barbed-wire borders of the Soviet Union to the disorienting freedom of Los Angeles, where everything they had learned about survival no longer applied, this is the story of the Soviet Jewish emigration of the 1970s: the fear before the decision, the cost of making it, and the daily struggle of starting over in a country where they had no roots.

For the millions of Jewish families who fled the USSR, and for their children and grandchildren who grew up knowing only fragments of the story, Last Train to Freedom tells it more fully than it has ever been told.

If you have ever wondered what your grandparents left behind, what it really cost them, and what they chose not to say, this is the memoir that answers those questions.

Accepted into the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Library collection, honored by the International Impact Book Awards and The BookFest, and celebrated by The Jerusalem Post, Last Train to Freedom has moved listeners across generations, Jewish and not, who recognize in one family's journey something that belongs to all of us.

This audiobook is accompanied by a family archive of photographs and documents spanning over a century, bringing the memoir's faces and places to life.

Narrated by Yuliya Patsay.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.