'Impossible' Max breathes. 'This is impossible.' Anna bends to put her lips to his ear 'No, it's not' she whispers. 'I know where to hide you. I have the perfect place.'

For fifty years Anna Schlemmer has refused to talk about her life in Germany during World War II. Her daughter, Trudy, was only three when she and her mother were liberated by an American soldier and went to live with him in Minnesota.

Trudy's sole evidence of the past is an old photograph: a family portrait showing Anna, Trudy, and a Nazi officer, the Obersturmführer of Buchenwald. Driven by guilt about her supposed Trudy, now a professor of German history, begins investigating the past and finally unearths the dramatic and heartbreaking truth about her mother's life.