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Almost forty years after the end of the end of the war, Claire Baum opens a package from a stranger in Rotterdam, unleashing a flood of repressed memories from her childhood. As Claire delves into her past, she uncovers the personal sacrifice and bravery of her parents, the Dutch resistance and the families that selflessly gave shelter to her and her sister, Ollie.

A month before George Stern’s thirteenth birthday, Germany invaded his native Hungary, anti-Jewish edicts were passed and a ghetto was established. A rebel even then, George refused to wear the Jewish star. “Passing” as a Christian boy, he survived the siege of Budapest as the Soviet Red Army pressed closer, strafing the city while the fascist Arrow Cross continued to hunt for Jews.

When 17-year-old Leslie Meisels insisted that his mother and two brothers join a transport leaving Debrecen, Hungary, to go who knows where, that decision luckily put them among the roughly 20,000 “exchange Jews” whose lives had been bartered for cash and military equipment in a secret deal with Adolf Eichmann.

Nearly buried alive, ten-year-old Michael Kutz narrowly escaped the Nazi death squad that killed 4,000 Jews, including his own family, in his hometown of Nieśwież. Guided by his mother’s last words and determined to survive, he became the youngest member of a partisan resistance group in the dense Belorussian forest, and took part in daring operations against the Nazis and their collaborators

David Newman’s gifts as a musician and a teacher carried him through years of brutality during the war. Torn from his family in Poland and deported for forced labour at Skarżysko- Kamienna, David battled desperation and the mounting death toll by writing songs, poems and satires about life in the camp. Later, in the infamous Buchenwald camp, the resistance recruited him for a clandestine initiative to protect the Jewish children there. With his soulful songs and his lessons for the children, David was able to rouse a chorus of hope, both in himself and those around him.

In the spring of 1944, as Germany occupied her native Hungary, Anna Hegedűs barely had time to notice the flowers blooming around her. One year later, as the lilacs blossomed once again, she returned to her hometown of Szatmár and set her memories, raw and vivid, to paper. Her unflinching words convey the bitter details of the Szatmár ghetto, Auschwitz, the Schlesiersee forced labour camp and a perilous death march. At forty-eight years old, Anna had survived a lifetime of trauma, and as she wrote, she waited, desperately hoping her family would return.

Lodz, Poland, 1944. Teenaged Henia Rosenfarb sat with her family in a small, secret room, hiding from Nazi soldiers who were looking for them. Little could the fiery redhead have imagined that her path would take her from wartime Poland to faraway Canada.

When the Nazis invaded her small town of Zduńska Wola, Poland, in 1939, sixteen-year-old Basia Kohn (later Betty Rich) escaped into Soviet-occupied Poland. Over the next five years, her journey took her thousands of kilometres from a forced labour camp in the far north of the USSR to the subtropical Soviet Georgian region and back to Poland. After the war, Betty and her husband fled from the Polish Communist regime and eventually immigrated to Toronto.

Transnistria, Romania, did not exist on a map. Yet that is where ten-year-old Felicia Steigman and her parents arrived in 1941, after a cruel deportation and death march overseen by Romanian Nazi collaborators. After surviving three years amid squalor, devastation and death, they finally returned to their pre-war idyllic hometown, Vatra Dornei, only to find their suffering being silenced. Decades later, Felicia was determined to commemorate the forgotten cemetery of Transnistria in a way that could not be ignored.

As Hitler’s army swept into Czechoslovakia in 1939, Anka Voticky, a twenty-five-year-old mother of two, her husband, Arnold, and her family fled halfway around the world to an unlikely refuge – the Chinese port of Shanghai. Estranged from all that was familiar, their security was threatened yet again when the Japanese occupying the city forced the Jewish refugees into a ghetto. After the war, the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia sent the Votickys on another harrowing journey out of Europe, this time to safety in Canada.