A novel based on the true story of an Auschwitz-Birkenau survivor traces the experiences of a Jewish Slovakian who uses his position as a concentration-camp tattooist to secure food for his fellow prisoners.

In 1939 Poland, Franciszka and her daughter endeavor to outsmart their neighbors and a German guard as they provide shelter to two Jewish families and a defecting German soldier--none of whom know about the others.

In 1942 sixteen-year-old Chaya Lindner is a Jewish girl living in Nazi-occupied Poland, a courier who smuggles food and documents to the isolated Jewish ghettos in southern Poland, depending on her forged papers and "Aryan" features--but when a mission goes wrong and many of her colleagues are arrested she finds herself on a journey to Warsaw, where an uprising is in the works.

During the winter of 1939, after Nazis invade Poland, Danusha and her family flee to Krakâow where her mother, Anna, secures a position as a housekeeper in a German doctor's mansion--a place where she comes to a startling revelation about a mother's love and protection.