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In 1954 Meziříčí, nine-year-old Mira is punished for disobeying her mother and denied the family's food, which turns out to be contaminated with typhoid. Her family dies in the epidemic, and she is sent to live with her aunt Hana, a gaunt, silent woman the town treats as an oddity. The novel then reveals Hana's backstory: a lively pre-war youth, deportation to Terezín and Auschwitz, and survival as nearly the only one of her Jewish family.
Both survivals in the story turn on chance rather than virtue. Mira lives only because she was being punished, and Hana outlives her family through the arbitrary selections of the camps.
Hana's silence, withdrawal and strange habits lead the town to see her as a mad or pitiable figure, a judgment made without knowing her history. The novel's structure first shows the behavior from the outside and only later explains its cause. This ordering argues that a survivor's surface oddness is a rational adaptation to past catastrophe, and that onlookers who do not know the history will consistently misinterpret it.
Hana raises Mira while never speaking about what happened to her. The child therefore absorbs the fear, emotional withdrawal and rituals of loss without understanding where they come from. Unspoken catastrophe passes to the next generation as atmosphere and behavior, and the child can only make sense of her own inherited wound once the story is finally told.