The book opens as Jews are experiencing mass deportation from Prague in the early 1940s. Kovaly's family are forced from their home and sent to the Lodz Ghetto in October 1941 and shortly after were sent to the infamous death camp Auschwitz. Heda was immediately separated from her parents. They were sent to the gas chamber to be executed on arrival. She also marched from Auschwitz to a nearby camp, improbably even more brutal than Auschwitz. That camp was Bergen Belsen, a work camp where the prisoners are literally dead men and women working. Kovaly develops a survival instinct at a young age. During one march with other female prisoners she manages to escape, saying later that living requires much less effort than waiting passively to die.
Returning home to Prague after the camps are liberated, Heda bounces from friend's house to friend's house, finding a marked reluctance to help her out even from friends who previously offered help. After so long under Nazi oppression, Prague has become both increasingly anti-Semitic and frightened to help returning Jews for fear of retribution. After the war, things improve little by little. Heda meets and marries Rudolf Margolius. They both feel increasingly drawn to Communism, not least because it offers an alternative to the slamming-the-door-in-the-face reaction to returning Holocaust survivors that she was experiencing. However, by the 1950s, their belief in and rose-tinted view of Communism changes when it turns out to be no more based on equality for all than the Fascism it replaced. Communist bigwigs live a life of luxury whilst the people endure poverty and difficulty. Suspicion and subterfuge is everywhere and in 1952, Rudolf, serving as a government minister, is arrested and tried on manufactured treason charges as part of the infamous Slansky trial.
After Rudolf's execution as a traitor, Heda finds it almost impossible to find a secure job to support herself and her infant son, Ivan. Nobody wants to hire someone who has fallen foul of the Party. Heda marries again but finds more excitement in the Prague Spring than in her new romance; the former restores her belief in humanity and its potential for good.
Fall 1968 and Heda emigrates to America, longing to see light after a life of darkness and oppression in her birth country, stating that eventually, when one fights against the world and loses every time, eventually one has to leave and go somewhere else.
