Postscript : A Family Torn by War Is United--45 Years Later : Imprisoned first by Nazis, then by Stalinists, Nina Duplakina survived decades of suffering to see her lost children at last.

Nina Duplakina was 24 and married to the neighborhood butcher. Her daughter was 6, her son 5, and she felt happy and safe in their East Berlin home.

Then the KGB came.

“They drove up. I was alone with my two children. They said, ‘Quickly, get dressed. You’re going,’ ” Duplakina recounted.

KGB officers hustled her into an overcoat, out the front door, down the walk, through the picket fence and into a waiting car. Her children ran after her, crying, tugging in vain at the hem of her skirt. “But no one paid any attention to them. We left them at the fence, shouting and crying,” Duplakina said, crying herself at the decades-old memory.

That day, 45 years ago, was the last time Duplakina saw her children--until this spring. With the help of Red Cross workers, the 69-year-old woman, living in this mining town 550 miles south of Moscow, was reunited in April with her daughter Kathe, now 50.

Then her son Felix came to visit.

For Duplakina, the reunions cap a life of extraordinary sorrow and suffering, one etched in the wrinkles of her face and the sadness of her eyes.

To spend the day with her daughter, she put on a cheerful lemon-yellow dress. But her smile often faded into a frown of preoccupied worry, and her joy at seeing her children is tempered by the knowledge of the years they have lost: “Now there is so little time left to live,” she said with a sigh.

Duplakina’s parents had both died before she was 11 years old. She was raised by her older brother, who was killed during World War II.

In the winter of 1943, the depth of World War II, the Germans occupied Shakhty, and Duplakina was rounded up and sent to a Berlin prison camp. She and the other prisoners worked at a sausage factory, and there she met Herman Angers, a German butcher.

“He helped everyone a little bit. But I was the smallest, I was 17, and I was always sick. They would take blood from us for the army, and after that I was always weak and ill. He would feed me, sneak me extra portions of food,” Duplakina said.

Angers and Duplakina fell in love. They married and their daughter was born in the midst of war. Despite Angers’ pleas, Duplakina remained in prison.

One day late in the war, when Angers was away, the prison warden’s sister suddenly and without explanation demanded custody of Kathe. The Allies had begun bombing Berlin; Duplakina was told she would have to give up her baby or she would be locked out of the camp bomb shelter. The warden’s sister marched Duplakina, cradling Kathe in her arms, to the gates of the camp.

“She opened the gates and said, ‘Get going.’ She knew I’d be afraid and I wouldn’t go far. She thought she’d scare me. But then the bombing really did begin, and what was I to do?”

Duplakina fled into the woods with her child, and Allied bombs destroyed the camp; a direct hit on the bomb shelter killed everyone inside.

Angers returned the next morning, found his wife and daughter and took them to his home. He told the German authorities that they had died in the bombing. Soon afterward, Berlin fell to the Red Army.

“Such joy that was! So much joy, everything was wonderful!” remembered Duplakina. “A Russian commander gave us permission to live in a house [at his disposal]. They helped us buy furniture. Everything was good. Officers would stop us to check our documents, and then happily let us pass. Ours, our Russians, had come!”

But the Russians brought more than joy: They brought Soviet Stalinism. Even as Angers and Duplakina were building their lives together, now buoyed by the birth of their son, Felix, men and women back in Russia were plotting to wreck their happiness.

Russians like to tell grim anecdotes about the mean-spirited envy that, to their chagrin, has long marked their national character.

In one widely told joke, a genie offers to grant a Russian muzhik , a peasant, one wish. But there is a catch: Whatever the muzhik wishes for, his neighbor will get double. After long thought, the muzhik makes his wish: “Let me go blind in one eye.”

Russian envy helped nourish the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. It was given its freest rein under Stalin. Two years ago, Duplakina finally got access to the minutes of her trial in absentia by one of the three-man committees that carried out Stalin’s purges during the war and its aftermath.

Three times the troika met to discuss Duplakina. The minutes show that its members had decided to punish Duplakina, but were not sure what their pretext should be. She had been taken to Germany during the war, married a German and become a citizen of East Germany. She had broken neither German nor Soviet law.

The Russian woman believes that she was punished for marrying a German during wartime. The troika’s exact motivation is unclear from the minutes of its deliberations, but it seems likely that her crime was living happily in a foreign country--presumably more happily than the troika members--instead of being miserable at home with everyone else.

She was eventually convicted of “political crimes” under Article 58--making her officially “an enemy of the people.”

“When they said 25 years, I didn’t even understand what they meant at first. I said, ‘Excuse me, I’m not 25 but 24.’ They said, ‘No, we are sentencing you to 25 years, in the prison camps.’ I said, ‘What have I done wrong? I’m not a murderer, not a spy, not a thief, I’m no one! What have I done? Why?’ ”

Back in Berlin, Angers had come home that fateful day to find his wife gone, their children hysterical. At the police station, he was told that his wife had been sent back to Russia. Returning home, he found Russian soldiers removing the furniture from his house. They had already confiscated the family photos, except for one of Duplakina and Kathe that had been overlooked; Angers grabbed it and fled with the children to his mother’s home.

He continued to search for Duplakina, but the East German authorities, never helpful, soon became threatening. So one day he told the children that their mother was dead.

Neither Kathe nor Felix knew whether they believed him. For years, Kathe, clutching the black and white photo of her mother, would approach Russian soldiers in East Germany. “Do you know my mother?” she would ask. “Can you help me find her?”

Duplakina had been put to work making bricks at a Siberian prison.

“I worked four years and 11 months, under the worst conditions. But that’s not worth talking about,” she said. Then she was summoned to another trial.

“I thought, ‘Of course, it’s the end.’ But at the trial, they announced I was illegally convicted. ‘There was nothing to try you over,’ they said. ‘We’re releasing you.’ ”

But in the Kafkaesque Soviet logic of those days, the new troika reaffirmed Duplakina’s guilt within seconds of exonerating her.

“I fell down, and cried, ‘What about my children? How will I find them?’

“They said, ‘Forget about that. You were nevertheless convicted of a political crime, under Article 58. You’re going home to the town where the Germans captured you.’ ”

Back in Shakhty, searching for her children seemed hopeless. Travel outside the Soviet Union was forbidden even to upstanding Communist Party members--much less to someone who had served time in the camps. The post office returned the letters she mailed to Berlin.

In 1960, Duplakina approached the KGB, hoping they would take pity on her and help her find her children. But pity at the KGB had never been in great supply.

“They said, ‘You’re under the 58th Article. As an enemy of the people, I’d think you ought to shut your mouth.’

“The court had said I was illegally tried. I have an official paper and documents to show that. In 1954 I was rehabilitated. But that didn’t interest anyone. It interested no one. They’d say, ‘You’re nevertheless under the 58th article!’ ”

The years went by. Duplakina remarried and had a daughter, Olga, now 40. She raised Olga on bedtime stories of an older brother and sister long lost in Germany.

Back in Germany, Herman Angers aged badly. He lived alone, never remarrying. Late in his life he began to drink heavily and cry a lot.

One day he told his children the truth, that their mother might still be alive.

“Children, look for her. I’m already unable to,” he said. Soon after, in 1993, Angers died of a heart attack.

That same year, Duplakina traveled to Moscow to apply for a second rehabilitation--a concept that would be redundant anywhere but in Russia.

“I heard how everywhere people were getting rehabilitated, and I thought, well, I’ll risk it again,” she said.

She received a new document asserting her innocence and, emboldened, she put in a missing persons query with the Red Cross in Shakhty.

This March, a Red Cross worker matched that query with one filed in Munich and telephoned Duplakina.

“She said, ‘Sit down, I have such news for you!’ ” said Duplakina of the call. “My heart started pounding. I said, ‘What, what?’

“She said, ‘Your granddaughter is looking for you!’

“I said, ‘What granddaughter? I don’t have a granddaughter!’ She said, ‘Your granddaughter from Germany, Natasha!’ ”

Natasha, 29, was Kathe’s daughter.

Kathe, who had married a man named Schieffer, had spent 45 years showing her mother’s photograph to anyone who would look. She flew to Shakhty immediately. She and her mother speak German--Duplakina somewhat haltingly, after decades of speaking only Russian.

At the reunion, Olga Duplakina and Kathe Schieffer, the two daughters, merely hugged and smiled. Asked if she remembered the day her mother disappeared, Kathe’s eyes filled, and she said only, “Yes.”

Telling her story, evoking the memories, Duplakina became agitated, distressed. Panting and crying, she began speaking in erratic, rapid-fire Russian, while Kathe looked on uncomprehendingly.

“Thirty years I’ve had horrible headaches, because I thought all the time horrible thoughts! Hunger, and they took my blood, and beat me, and all of that happened! . . . I was married to a German during such a war! That made everyone else angry. They didn’t understand he had saved me. He saved me from death, that man! Why did they have to hurt him?”

Kathe whispered in German in her ear, and Duplakina calmed herself. Talk turned to happier topics--such as the impending arrival of Felix and of a group of grandchildren .

“They say they want to stay at my apartment, but I have no beds for them,” said Duplakina, frowning anxiously. “They say they’ll sleep on the floor. I told them to bring blankets.”

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The Odyssey of Nina Duplakina

1) SHAKHTY TO BERLIN

Invading Germans round up Nina Duplakina, 17, and send her to prison camp. She later marries a German and escapes the camp with their daughter.

2) BERLIN TO PECHORA

After liberation of Berlin, victorious Russians convict her of “political crimes” and send her to Siberian prison. Husband and children--now including a son--remain in Berlin.

3) PECHORA TO SHAKHTY

Nearly five years later, Duplakina is released to Shakhty. Unable to contact her Berlin family, she remarries and has another daughter.