The journey of a German Ecuadorian widower, Ernst Contag, and his four young children from their home in South America to Nazi Germany in 1942. Blacklisted as an enemy alien, Contag and his children were forcibly repatriated to the country of his grandparents' birth as part of a diplomatic exchange arranged by the United States State Department and cooperating countries. Denying their Ecuadorian citizenship, they had to learn to navigate an ever-shifting horizon as they faced internment, separation, hunger, and hopelessness in Germany and France, then hostility when they eventually returned to their Andean homeland.