Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt was put on a train to Florence by his Jewish parents in Hamburg when he was ten years old in 1938. From there, he ended up in a French children's home in the Savoie Alps. Goldschmidt describes life there, the struggle against homesickness, the numerous corporal punishments and the secret pleasure derived from them, as well as the constant threat posed by the German occupiers in his narrative 'The Isolation.' In the foreword by Peter Handke, it states: "Goldschmidt has written something akin to a dream book: in the sense that he provides a language for situations and events for which there was none until then, almost somnambulistically, aimlessly, without intention, yet all the clearer and more immediate he simply presents it. Yes, comparable books are sometimes written by a dreamer - only here, upon awakening, the book is there, present, at hand: perhaps more than a 'dream book.'".