After his successful book "Sire, I Hurry" about Frederick the Great and Voltaire, Hans Joachim Schädlich - as Die Zeit wrote, "one of the greats in contemporary German literature" - now presents a kind of double biography, this time about the lives of two painters, Felix Nussbaum (1904-1944) and Felka Platek (1899-1944): married, Jewish, both fleeing until their deaths in Auschwitz. Rome, on a warm afternoon in May 1933. A violent attack by his colleague Hanns Hubertus Graf von Merveldt forces the German-Jewish painter Felix Nussbaum to leave the Villa Massimo. His partner, the Polish-Jewish painter Felka Platek, and he cannot return to Germany due to the persecution of Jews. They first travel to the Italian Riviera, followed by stays in Paris and Ostend, and then they find accommodation in Brussels.