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Each year, delegations of Israeli high-school students visit Poland, where millions of Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, in order to learn first-hand what the Jews suffered there. Amela Einat`s book describes a rather unusual delegation. The boys and girls are joined by several elderly Holocaust survivors, now living in Israel, who were incarcerated in Auschwitz as children. They were 8-12 years old at the time, and among the few survivors of the camp. Einat`s moving book combines the stories of the survivors trying to connect with their past with the experiences of a young Israeli boy and girl trying to uncover the personal stories of their damaged parents, and with the story of Gali, who is trying to write a research paper on the survivors.

Karin is the daughter of a Polish mother and the granddaughter of a peasant couple who handed Jews over to the Nazis. In order to atone for the deeds of her parents, Karin`s mother married a Jew and went to live in Israel with him. There she raised her daughter alone after her husband left her. During the trip, Karin slips away from the hotel in order to find the village where her mother was born. Ben is the son of an Auschwitz survivor who is alienated from his wife and only son because of his nightmare memories of the past. Ben, anxious to understand his father through this trip to Poland, discovers that he was one of the group of children in Auschwitz. He tries to approach Karin and succeeds, with the help of one of the adults, in rescuing her from a group of thugs who are harassing her. Neither of them plans to tell their parents anything about their experiences in Poland.