To Antoine

In this timely work of historical fiction by E. J. Wiens, the narrator, Peter Enns, a retired teacher in Manitoba, faces judgement as a war criminal. He relives his childhood and youth during the Stalinist terrors and escape following the Nazi occupation of his Mennonite village in Ukraine, then a refugee in Germany, an interlude in Paraguay, and finally three troubled decades as a father and teacher in Canada. While he awaits his fate he struggles with his judgement upon himself, haunted by memories of looming figures from his Mennonite past, and above all by the shrouded presence of Antoine, his mentor and idol during his youth and early manhood.