Elizabeth, a young Jewish woman, is training to be a nurse in Pearl Harbor, where the turquoise ocean laps the golden sand. When she meets Everett, a Hollywood actor who has given up his glamorous life to join the Air Force on the tiny island, the breath is knocked out of her. Over a sweltering Hawaiian summer, they fall madly in love, Elizabeth getting lost in Everett’s emerald eyes. But one fateful day, sirens rend the air and warplanes fly over the harbor. Elizabeth and Everett cling to each other as the ground shakes and smoke suffocates them.

“Women and children to the right. Men, to the left,” I once said. From 1942 to 1944 I was what some called a Jew killer. Though, I have never hurt a soul, I was responsible for separating Jewish families, ensuring they would never see each other again. Those who were sick, were sent to their death...by me because I was forced to follow the enemy. The war stole my right of beliefs, my goals for a future, my left arm, and the love of my life.

Very few people can say they were born inside a concentration camp during the Holocaust. Disease, starvation, and much worse, prevented most prisoners from surviving. I shouldn’t be alive. As a child, I didn’t know my life was different from that of others. I had nothing to compare it to, and I had no insight about the day I was born...until the moment I overheard the truth. In a split second, I became a stranger to my reflection, my name, and my reason for being. I felt utterly alone in a foreign world, but that changed when I met another person who was lost, like me. 

The cattle car is dark, except for the light filtering through the boarded windows. There are too many of us to count, crushed up against each other. The air is stuffy, carrying the scent of our terror—none of us know what awaits us when this train stops. I cling onto Mama’s hand and Nora, my twin sister, clutches Papa’s.

In the mountains of Bohemia, Mila, a Romani, works as a maid for an aristocratic Jewish family. They have no idea that she and their son Ben, with his amber eyes and kind smile, are madly in love—it is expressly forbidden. In the arms of one another, Mila and Ben try to forget that their village is close to the German borders—and could be invaded at any second. But as they huddle around a crackling radio, ice runs through their veins as news of the war gets grimmer by the day.