Last Train to Freedom

by Deborah Swift Book 1 in the Survivors of War series.

First published 2025

Amazon

4.3(1,732)

Lithuania, 1940. As Soviet power closes over the country and refugees search for a route out of Europe, Zofia and her brother Jacek are offered a possible escape through visas issued by Japanese consul Chiune Sugihara. Their journey is complicated by a parcel of intelligence that makes them valuable to people on both sides of the widening war.

The route east across the Soviet Union turns flight into a test of trust, endurance and identity. Zofia must decide whom she can rely on while the political map changes around her. The novel draws on the little-known escape route created by Sugihara’s transit visas and uses it to show the Second World War from the perspective of displaced civilians moving between Soviet, Nazi and Japanese spheres of power.