Ruth tells the moving story of her mother, Irene Levin, who was born Josepha Weil in 1927. Josepha was a child of a large, prosperous, secular family in the Sudetenland, a German corridor of western Czechoslovakia. Josepha was just over eleven years old when her father died, and Hitler walked through the Sudetenland. By December 1941, Josepha, her mother, Irena, and stepfather, Georg, were deported to Terezin, where they spent over two years. Deportation to Auschwitz and slave labor at a sub-camp called Christianstadt followed.