Sent to England as a girl to avoid the Nazi occupation of Czechslovakia during the Second World War, Magdalena Krondl returned to her country as the communists were appropriating all private property - including her parents' factories and farm. Unable to face the Soviet invasion of her country in 1968, Magdalena fled and arrived in Canada with husband and younger son as refugees. Within ten years she became a tenured professor at the University of Toronto. The story of her eventful life is a testament to one woman's faith in the value of traditional family, friendship and the need to be supremely adaptive.