"As the train tracks clatter beneath me, I am reminded of those days fifty years ago when i heard the same clatter of the train on our way to you and wonder, 'Why did you do it?' The answer for you was very simply, 'I had no choice. How could I let two small children die?'"
In 1984, Claire Baum receives a letter from a stranger in Holland who has found a package from the war that belongs to Claire's family. When it arrives, Claire discovers letters, drawings and photographs that she and her sister, Ollie, sent to their parents during the war. Along with the package come a flood of repressed memories from the years that the young girls were hidden by the sister of one of their father's Resistance comrades, the woman they called Tante Nel.