What to do if your family is far from home, from everything familiar and familiar, and before Christmas you don’t even have a Christmas tree? You can dress up a branch of wormwood: cut fringe from an old tattered book, make lambs, chickens, horses from dough. It will turn out to be black and white, but very beautiful! Five-year-old Mariikhe knows that there will definitely be a gift on the plate under such a tree in the morning, because she has behaved well, almost well, all year. Christmas always remains a holiday - even on the unfamiliar Siberian land, where Mariikhe and her family were sent at the beginning of the war. Children's memory retains only fragmentary memories, only fragments of parental explanations about how and why this happened. The heavy tread of history is muffled, the girl barely hears it - and remembers quiet moments of joy, moments of everyday grief, fragile images that at first glance say nothing about the era of the 1940s. Mariikhe, her sisters Mina and Lilya, their mother, Aunt Yuzefina with her son Theodore, friends and neighbors in Rovnopol - Russian Germans. And although they, as dad explained to the girls, are “good Germans” and not “fascists,” they are forbidden to continue living in their native places: what if they go over to the enemy’s side? No matter how difficult the move may be for a family, good people help them cope - there are such people in any area, in any nation, at any time. The author of the book, Olga Kolpakova, is a famous children's writer, the creator of an entire collection of illustrated encyclopedias. The story “Wormwood Tree” is also educational: the text is accompanied by detailed comments that explain the context of the era and the essence of the historical events mentioned in the book. For middle school-age readers, the story will be both a fascinating read, encouraging empathy, and an extracurricular history lesson. The publication is illustrated by the artist Sergei Ukhach (Germany). All illustrations are made using the monotype technique - this is a print made from a single printing plate, the image on which was applied manually. Soft colors and contours repeat the mood of the book, conveying a child’s faith in miracles, not destroyed by any whirlwind of historical changes.