Samuel Adler is six years old when his father disappears during the Night of Broken Glass, and his family, like all Jews, loses everything. His mother, desperate, secures him a place on the train that will take him from Nazi Austria to England. A new chapter begins for Samuel, with inseparable companions for the rest of his long life: his faithful violin and the weight of loneliness and uncertainty.

Leticia Cordero, at the age of seven, illegally enters the United States crossing the Rio Grande clinging to her father, having miraculously escaped the genocide that wiped out her village during the Civil War.

Eighty decades later, seven-year-old Anita Diaz climbs onto the roof of a train with her mother to escape a deadly threat in El Salvador and they find themselves exiled to the United States. Their arrival coincides with the new, relentless government policy that separates mother and daughter at the border.

A contemporary novel about the sacrifices that parents are sometimes forced to make, about the remarkable ability of some children to survive through violence without ceasing to dream.