In an extraordinary literary debut, Aldo Zargani reconstructs the lost world of his Jewish childhood during the perilous years 1938-45 when he and his family fled from Fascists and Nazis in northern Italy. His haunting memoir acquires a cinematic intensity as he crosscuts from the blood-red stone spires of Basel, where his father failed to find refuge for his family in 1939, to fiery scenes of the Allied bombing of Turin in 1942, to the freezing winter of 1943-44, which Zargani and his brother spent hidden in a Catholic boarding school deep in the countryside.