A battered child's suitcase bearing the name of a 13 year old Jewish girl, Hana Brady, is donated to a small Holocaust museum in Tokyo and inspires the curator and a group of children to research the identity and fate of its owner. Their quest gives them a very personal sense of the horror of the Holocaust when, through contact with Hana's brother, they learn how her happy childhood in a small Czechoslovakian town was overtaken by a sequence of events that led to separation from her parents, her brother, and to her death in the gas chamber at Auschwitz. By interweaving their quest with the story they uncover, the book - which includes photographs and original documents - dramatises the processes of history in a unique and poignant manner.