"In twelve nonfiction tales, Hanna Krall reveals how the lives of World War II survivors are shaped in surprising ways by the twists and turns of historical events. A paralytic Jewish woman starts walking after her husband is suffocated by fellow Jews afraid that his coughing will reveal their hiding place to the Germans. A young American man learns Polish to communicate with his dybbuk, the ghost of his half brother who died in the Warsaw ghetto. A high-ranking German officer conceives of a plan to kill Hitler after witnessing a mass execution of Jews in Eastern Poland. And in the title story, which was excerpted in The New Yorker, a signmaker's daughter learns that her mother is not the woman who raised her but a mysterious stranger living in Germany."--BOOK JACKET.