On a cool, end-of-July morning in 1939, eleven-year-old Sylvia Couturie and her eight-year-old sister, Marguerite, escorted by their Irish nanny, "Wally," left their family's elegant French chateau for a fantastically ill-timed vacation. Expecting their parents to join them in a month, they embarked in high spirits on this rare adventure outside their privileged but tightly confined orbit of horses and hunts, servants and boarding schools. They sensed the distant rumblings of trouble on the edges of their world, but it would have been inconceivable that their long-awaited holiday would become a prolonged imprisonment, that their difficult governess would become their tyrannical jailer. It would defy belief to think that these daughters of privilege would soon be forced to fight for survival in a strange land as the world descended into war, with only the indomitable spirit of a little girl to carry them through. Cut off from their family as France falls to the Germans, the penniless threesome is reduced to living in a miserable cottage without indoor plumbing on a remote strip of the Irish coast. As the months turn into years, Sy