The author of this book was born in Barcelona and raised Catholic in Franco's staunchly Roman Catholic Spain. Many years later, after the long illness and death of her mother, Dory Sontheimer discovers, in the attic of her house, seven boxes that reveal an identity and a past as unknown as dramatic. While putting in order this emergent legacy, made up of photographs, letters, passports, and other documents, Sontheimer pieces together a chronicle of her family. For twelve years, and moved by a mixture of fascination, curiosity and a sense of duty, she carries out an investigation that will take her to Germany, Israel, the US, Canada, and the Czech Republic. Thus she follows the trail of one of the many, many families that were victims of the wholesale slaughter of Jews, some of which preemptively seeked refuge in Barcelona against the ravages of Nazism.