Zofia, 18, is the story’s protagonist and narrator; her experiences are relayed through first-person narration. She is a resilient character who has suffered immensely through her years imprisoned in concentration camps; when she is released, she is close to starving, needs to have two toes amputated from frostbite, has scarring from injuries received working at the camps, and has massive gaps in her memories of moments that are too traumatic to recall. One of these gaps is Zofia’s memory loss around the death of her brother, Abek. Zofia’s search for Abek, whom she falsely believes she told to meet her at the family apartment, drives the plot; Zofia travels to their home in Sosnowiec and then to Germany to a refugee camp and then to an orphanage looking for Abek. 

Through the course of the story, Zofia gains in physical strength, forms new friendships (such as with Breine and Esther at Foehrenwald), and begins to slowly recall the facts of her family’s deaths. She is reunited with the boy she believes to be Abek, but she eventually remembers the moment when she smothered Abek on the train, and realizes that this boy cannot be Abek.

Zofia has a romantic relationship with Josef, a man she meets at Foehrenwald, whom she believes to be a Jew who was liberated from a concentration camp, but she works out that Josef was a Nazi soldier during the war.