Aron, the narrator, an unhappy young boy and his family are driven by the German onslaught from the Polish countryside into an area in Warsaw that is battered by deprivation, disease, and persecution. He and a handful of boys and girls risk their lives by smuggling and trading things through the quarantine walls in hopes of keeping their families alive. When his family is stripped away from him, Aron is rescued by Janusz Korczak, a doctor renowned throughout Europe as an advocate of children's rights who, once the Nazis swept in, was put in charge of the Warsaw orphanage. But Treblinka awaits them all. Does Aron manage to escape, as Korczak suspects he could, to spread the word about the atrocities?