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It's 1940, and the beautiful world thirteen year old Alina Fischer has grown up in is changing. It's hard to believe anything could change in the sleepy village of Felsental, outside of Cologne, Germany. But the world is changing, and with many strange occurrences, like the herds of people walking down the street with suitcases wearing yellow stars on their coats. Or the word "conscription", and all the terror it brings, and the extreme, sometimes desperate, loyalty to this one man, this Hitler fellow she's heard of. But Alina is just a child, or so her brother Otto says, she doesn't understand such things. She doesn't understand the red flags with the black symbols, why certain children can no longer be her classmates, why the world is being stripped of its beauty. Alina shouldn't understand, but she does. But the gift of understanding, once so valued, can be the line between life and death.