Jacob and Moses Stein lived with their sister Judith in Paris, until in August 1942 the great raid against the foreign Jews was unleashed. His parents, known German playwrights, are hidden in France, but before his aunt manages to send them to the south, the gendarmes stop them and take them to the Winter Velodrome, where more than four thousand children, five thousand women and three thousand men had to subsist without food or water for five days. Jacob and Moses manage to flee before being sent on trains to the Drancy camp. When they go to their house in Paris their aunt has disappeared. Then they decide to travel alone to Valence to look for their parents, but the road will not be safe or easy.