Peter, a boy of five, makes an extraordinary journey through wartorn Europe, travelling with his parents from a small Hungarian town, through Austria and on to Germany. Along the way, unforgettable images of adventure flash one after another: sleeping in a tent and then under the night sky, discovering a disused brick factory, catching butterflies in the meadows, before Peter realizes that the adventure is really a nightmare, as he watches bombs fall from the blue sky outside Vienna and starts lessons with his mother in Bergen-Belsen. Drawn against a background of terror, starvation, and his father's and grandmother's deaths, this is a story of survival; of love between mother and son; and of enduring hope in the face of unspeakable hardship.