A Jewish resistance fighter during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Anna reluctantly forms a relationship with a Treblinka death camp guard who, after the war ends, is hunted by an Auschwitz survivor who seeks to execute him for mass murder. At the novel's outset, the idealistic Anna tells her university friends in Warsaw that they should meet the German invaders with Tolstoyan passive resistance, not with violence. But Anna learns that extermination of the Jews is the grand plan as she desperately tries to save ghetto children and herself. Julian Kravetz, a New York City novelist, discovers the story of Anna after the death of his parents in the late 20th Century when he finds their diaries at his father's former Chinatown apartment. Kravetz slowly pieces together in a novel what actually happened to his parents in Poland and later in Germany.