Fifteen years after her mother’s death, journalist Marisa Fox discovers a buried secret: her mother had been in a Nazi concentration camp as a young girl. There, she and 60 other Jewish girls from her home region in Poland, toiled as slaves, turning flax into threads for S.S. uniforms. Unlike the typical holocaust story, they all survived. But at what cost? Most of the girls remained connected as they weaved new lives throughout the globe. Marisa’s mother went on to fight as a commando in the Israeli War of Independence, cutting every tie to her past, even her name. A lost diary of the girls’ days in the concentration camp resurfaces in Australia, and Marisa finds there in the handwriting of a mother she never knew clues about sisterhood, secrets and survival—and the way they thread through generations.