In the 1920s, Etta Millerberg had what she imagined to be an ordinary life until her son asked her and her husband to move into his home to help care for his newborn daughter. But after moving from her beloved Berlin to America, a series of events leaves Etta stripped of all contact with her granddaughter. Thus begins a journey through more than two decades that covers a variety of community disasters, achievements, death and the special horrors of World War II as seen through the eyes of Etta and her friends. Through these years Etta grows from her new experiences in a new land as she witnesses America’s fall and restoration, and, from her viewpoint, America’s  long delayed entrance into the war.