Bergen-Belsen

The majority of the novel takes place on the Bergen-Belsen camp in what is now Lower Saxony in northern Germany. Before the war, this was a Nazi concentration camp, and after the British liberated the prisoners, Bergen-Belsen was transformed into a displaced persons camp (what we today call a refugee camp). This is the most important setting in the novel because it shows the survivors in their post-war process of displacement, confusion, trauma, and healing.

Köhn

Gerta spent her young childhood in Köhn, Germany. She remembers only snippets of her idyllic childhood, walking down cobblestoned pathways to music school with her papa.

Würzburg

Gerta spends her remaining childhood and early teenage years in Würzburg, Germany, with her father and her glamorous stepmother Maria, who is also her opera maestra. Her father took on a new surname and identity as a gentile and Gerta grows...