Having left Nazi-occupied Vienna a year ago, thirteen-year-old Jewish refugee Stephie Steiner adapts to life in the cultured Swedish city of Gothenburg, where she attends school, falls in love, and worries about her parents who were not allowed to emigrate.

When Nadia arrives in Canada in 1950 with Marusia, the woman she calls mother, she is glad to finally be out of the displaced persons camp where she has lived for five years, but troubled by confused memories of World War II; she speaks Ukrainian, but she seems to remember living with a German Nazi family who called her by a different name--and as she tries to settle into the Canadian-Ukrainian community of Brantford she is haunted by one question:...

Nearly four years after leaving Vienna to escape the Nazis, Stephie Steiner, now sixteen, and her sister Nellie, eleven, are still living in Sweden, worrying about their parents and striving to succeed in school, and at odds with each other despite their mutual love.