At the beginning, there is a taboo being broken: The child asks his aunt Gerda from America, who is visiting East Germany, how she lost her child in the concentration camp. The coffee guests fall silent in shock. Thirty years later, Knut Elstermann visits Gerda in New York and poses the question to her again. He recounts the close family ties of the pre-war era, the survival of Jewish friends and acquaintances, but also deportation and death: In Auschwitz, Gerda had to helplessly watch her newborn child die. She escaped the death march - a Wehrmacht soldier protected her. It is the story of a search for truth in documents and eyewitness accounts as well as in her own memory. She hid from the Nazis, survived Auschwitz - 60 years later, she found the strength to speak about it for the first time.