This book follows Syvia (now Sylvia) Perlmutter, one of the twelve children to survive the Lodz ghetto. Syvia moves into a ghetto at age five. Things are rapidly getting scarier for her, beginning when her best friend Hava disappears, to receiving "wedding invitations" (orders to be at the train station). Even when the children are all told to board, Syvia is hidden away. When the Germans find her, all seems lost. But, in the end, they are saved - by the very star that caused them so much humiliation.