Marek and Celia Dawidowicz are Jewish Poles, who live with their son, Kuba, and nine-year-old daughter, Janian, in Kalisch. As war approaches, the family moves to Warsaw, and Marek and Kuba go off to fight. Marek tries to get his wife to flee to the Russian zone, but she refuses, so Marek returns, and the family members, including her grandparents, are eventually packed off to the Ghetto. Just before the Ghetto uprising in 1943, Marek has Janian smuggled out. First, she lives with Frau Grabowska and her husband. (Frau Grabowska, though an Aryan, had once been Marek's girlfriend.) Next, using false papers, Janian is boarded in a monastery school. And when the Gestapo start sniffing around, she is transferred to another one. Having made it to the end of the war, however, bad news awaits her. Only one other family member has survived.
