One night in September 1943, a Jewish mother took her nine-year-old son in one arm and five-year-old daughter in the other and jumped off a moving train to save their lives. Decades later, the town of Fossano, Italy, still celebrates the local heroes who found the mother and her children by the tracks and risked everything to hide them from the Nazis. But the whole story—where they came from and how they got there—remained a mystery until now. 

The past and present converge in this deeply reported narrative as award-winning writer Ari Schneider travels across Europe, retracing his family’s Holocaust story amid a global resurgence of far-right nationalism. His journey takes him to a cemetery in Poland where generations of his ancestors were buried, and a new mystery arises.