Just as fifteen-year-old East Berliner Erika Nordern is preparing for an important track competition, sinister police inquiries and the apperance of a relative believed to be dead indicate that her family has not yet escaped the shadow of long-ago Nazi crimes.
After being forced from his meager family farm in Texas in 1871, thirteen-year-old Ben Curtis witnesses some of the excitement and cruelty of the Old West--on a cattle drive, in a frontier town, and on a buffalo hunt.
In 1943, with the surrender of Italy to the Allies, Corporal Vito Salvani finds himself and the orphaned Jewish boy Judah trapped in enemy territory in France, where they must flee from an obsessed Gestapo agent.