Vera Hertzsch's name is familiar to many Icelanders and is inextricably linked to Halldór Laxness and his showdown with the Soviet communist he had embraced as a young man. In the winter of 1938, at the height of Stalin's purges, Vera was arrested with her one-year-old half-Icelandic daughter in front of Halldór, who was a guest at their home in Moscow. A quarter of a century passed before he came clean about the incident, but the fate of the mothers remained an unsolved mystery.

Vera and the little girl faced a fate they shared with millions of Soviet citizens: miserable concentration camps, disease, slavery, and hunger. They never returned, and little or no news reached relatives and friends who lived in uncertainty for decades together.

Jón Ólafsson has researched Vera Hertzsch's life story, tracing it through difficult sources and through the memoirs of women who were in the same concentration camps but, unlike Vera, survived. It also sheds light on Icelanders' encounters with Stalin's Soviet Union and the showdown that took place decades later – and the reasons why Vera Hertzsch became nationally known in Iceland long after she disappeared.

The book Apples from Abkhazia , published by Forlagsinn, tells this moving story. It won the Hagþenkir non-fiction award in 2012 and was also nominated for the Icelandic Literature Award in 2012. The Hagþenkir 2012 award committee's report on the book says: "An impressive and critical analysis of communism and the Soviet Gulag that exposes the vulnerability of the average citizen." See more at: http://hagthenkir.is/

Data related to the publication are now on display in the Icelandic Museum in the National Library.