Back to the U.S.S.R. : Homeland: Concert pianist Sofia Cosma left Soviet prison camps almost 40 years ago. Monday, she will return to the Soviet Union to perform at Moscow’s Tchaikovsky Hall.

Sofia Cosma was thrown into a Soviet prison camp at the start of World War II and spent the next seven years battling starvation.

The young woman, who had studied to be a classical pianist, was put to work at hard labor weeding carrots and potatoes and making charcoal briquettes.

After her release, Cosma found her way to Romania, discovering that life in that country also consigned her to an existence of hardship.

She won stardom as the piano soloist with the Romanian Philharmonic. But that did not put an end to sharing a cramped four-bedroom apartment with another family or waiting in long lines for scraps of meat to feed her children.

In 1981, Cosma finally fled the communist world. Today she lives in Camarillo, ensconced in a spacious house--complete with two glossy black grand pianos--that her daughter Ilona Scott had built after their defection.

Since coming to the United States, she has lived a quiet life with Ilona and Toby Scott. She gives piano lessons to about 20 students and occasionally performs in Ventura County.

Now, however, the 75-year-old pianist is embarking on a triumphant journey back into the past.

Four decades after her release from the prison camps of Siberia, Cosma is returning to the Soviet Union, where she has been invited to give a solo performance at Moscow’s Tchaikovsky Hall on Monday.

At the same time, Cosma’s daughter will return to Romania. There, the new government will allow Scott and her husband to bring home their 4-year-old adoptive daughter, Jessica, whom they have been struggling to bring to the United States for three years.

The two homecomings will be chronicled in a movie documentary on Cosma, whom film producer Lisa Sonne describes as “an icon who captures the travails and triumphs of our century.”

“This is great to play with the Moscow Philharmonic,” Cosma said last week, visibly excited, as she sat in her Camarillo home and talked about her life.

Cosma was born in Latvia in pre-communist Russia. Her family later moved to Moscow, where she and other city children marched in Lenin’s funeral parade.

Otherwise, her childhood passed uneventfully. Her family returned to Latvia, where the young girl began to study piano.

By the time she was 18, Cosma knew that her life would center on music. The talented pianist moved to Austria and, as did many emigre musicians, changed her citizenship to Austrian.

However, the young Jewish woman grew fearful of Austria’s changing politics and, in 1938, returned to her family in Latvia, seeking refuge from the Nazis.

Ironically, Cosma’s Austrian passport marked her as a traitor to the Soviet Union, and she was arrested in 1941 on the day war was declared on Nazi Germany.

She spent the next seven years in Russian prison camps.

“It was a very hard, an extremely hard, life,” Cosma said.

Not a day passed that she did not long to touch a keyboard.

“I thought that I never will play more,” she said last week. “I felt I am dead for music.”

But with characteristic optimism and resourcefulness, Cosma made a life for herself inside the camp. She married another prisoner and gave birth to Ilona, for whom she hoarded scraps of woolen thread taken from other prisoners’ underwear to crochet a dress.

Cosma and her daughter were released from the camp in 1948. Because of her citizenship, Cosma was returned to Austria. Her husband was placed six months later in his native Romania. She joined him in 1950 after a two-year campaign to get him out of Romania failed.

There, the family, which soon included a son, shared a four-room apartment with another family. Cosma spent her time cleaning the quarters, caring for her children and waiting for groceries in endless lines.

“It was a hard life to stand in lines to get a piece of meat or sometimes a piece of butter,” Cosma said. “It was a battle for life, a hard battle.”

Despite the conditions, Cosma made sure her children were happy. And Cosma’s life improved when she found a piano. A family, fleeing the country, sold it to her for what then served as hard currency--a watch, a coat and Austrian chocolate bars.

Friends ultimately persuaded her to audition as a permanent soloist with the Romanian Philharmonic, and she embarked on her career, performing on stage, radio and television.

For three years after she returned to performing, the muscles in her arms ached, throbbing from wrist to shoulder.

The muscles had atrophied during the 15 years she was prohibited from practicing, first by internment in Russian prison camps and later by economic hardships in dictator-run Romania.

“I wanted only to play well, but it was hard for me,” she recalled last week. “My muscles were sore for three years. After every concert, I was tired.”

Tours took her to Italy, East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Cuba.

“So I began to get a better life, but I had no freedom,” Cosma said. “I had no big pleasure of life.”

After her daughter emigrated to the United States in 1973, Cosma made several trips to visit her. However, she did not feel free to defect until after her husband died and her son, Mihail, told her he also planned to leave. He did so in 1982 and now lives in Camarillo.

Today, when Cosma sits down at the piano, even if it is just to tickle the ivories for visitors, she assumes an unmistakable mantle of artistic power.

“She’s strong,” said Karine Beesley, executive director of the Ventura County Symphony, which has featured Cosma in guest appearances. “She can really get a song out of the piano.”

Cosma continues to practice three to four hours a day, refusing to give in to back pain in her quest to maintain the skill and force that mark her performances.

But sitting in the oversized living room, with the twin pianos covered with mementos from her European performances, Cosma seemed less an icon or world-renowned artist than a favorite aunt.

Shyly reluctant to pose for pictures, Cosma worried about how her wispy brown hair would look for her performance in Moscow, then laughed amiably when her daughter said there is no hope.

Cosma said she is eager to sightsee in the Soviet Union and to visit with relatives she has not seen for more than 15 years. But she is not homesick for her native land. Nor does she plan to return to Romania.

After years of struggling, she is free.

“This is freedom, what is here,” she said. “It’s enough.”