1956: Amara, a young Italian journalist, is sent to report on the growing political divide between East and West in post-war central Europe. She also has a more personal mission: to find out what happened to Emanuele, her childhood friend and soulmate from pre-war Florence. Emanuele and his family were Jews transported by the Nazis from wartime Vienna. So she visits the Holocaust museum at Auschwitz, and Budapest, where she is caught up in the tumultuous events of the October rising against the Soviet Union. Along the way she meets many other survivors, each with their own story to tell. But did Emanuele survive the war or, like so many other Viennese Jews, did he die in Auschwitz or a ghetto in Poland?