Esfir Manevich is a young Jew­ish girl who lives in the Pol­ish town of Kobrin in 1936. Fac­ing anti-Semi­tism in pub­lic school, Esfir moves in with her charm­ing aunt who runs a board­ing­house in the bustling city of Brest. Being younger than the oth­er board­ers, Esfir strug­gles to find a place in her new life, all the while wor­ry­ing about her dimin­ish­ing role in the fam­i­ly she left behind. As the years pass, Esfir expe­ri­ences the bomb­ing of her home­town dur­ing the Ger­man inva­sion of 1939. When the Rus­sians over­take the area, Esfir sees many of her social­ist rel­a­tives and friends become dis­il­lu­sioned by the harsh restric­tions. Dur­ing the Ger­man occu­pa­tion, Esfir and her fam­i­ly are enclosed in a ghet­to where they devel­op heart­break­ing meth­ods of sur­vival. In the sum­mer of 1942, short­ly before Esfir’s thir­teenth birth­day, the ghet­to is liq­ui­dat­ed and the inhab­i­tants are forced onto cat­tle cars des­tined for the killing fields — and Esfir must face unimag­in­able horror.