Peter Buck Feller's father disappeared in Moscow in 1938, when Feller was just six months old. As a young boy he asked his mother about him, but his questions invariably went unanswered.
Decades later, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Feller embarked on a detailed search to reclaim his father. It took him and his adult daughters to Moscow, Siberia, and Germany. He gained access to a now-declassified espionage FBI file, which contained an anonymous letter from a man who had been imprisoned in one of Stalin's gulags: "I plan to write a book about all what occurred to me during these dreadful ten years. The title of this book, I would like it to be 'The Last Gasp of William Schwarzfeller'."