The Girl in the Red Coat

Nives Schwartz never imagined that her mother Sara’s life concealed secrets she knew nothing about. After her mother’s death, however, forced to overcome her grief quickly so she could deal alone with all the responsibilities that fall to a daughter, Nives finds an old tin box that had been forgotten. An old biscuit tin that clashes with her mother’s obsessive orderliness. Inside it are an old photograph depicting two unknown young people, a few notes, and a letter. Violating Sara’s privacy is not her intention, but those pages seem to call to her, and so, almost by chance, Nives enters a world of secrets and truths kept silent for more than half a century, whose existence she had never suspected. In 1965, a woman named Bekka Kis wrote a long letter to her mother, confiding her fears, the never-forgotten anguish of having survived the Shoah, of having lost everything she loved. And perhaps of having caused the deaths of many. From that moment, Nives begins an investigation to find Bekka Kis, a search that is also an excavation into her family’s most intimate secrets, a digging up of truths incomprehensible to anyone who did not live through that world. It will be a journey into the most fragile and torn heart of the Second World War, a revelation of that sense of guilt that only the survivors can explain. But it will also be the story of a love stronger than war, stronger than separation. Stronger than death.