Muki W. Fairchild is the grand-daughter of Bernhard Wachstein, a renowned Jewish author and archivist from Vienna. Accompanied by her daughter Elizabeth, Muki visits the Austrian State Archive in Vienna to discover the truth of her family’s aryanized properties, including her great-uncle’s sanatorium from the 1920s. Retired archivist Dr. Hubert Steiner assists her in her search, driven by his concern for the preservation of history and truth.
Brazilian anthropologist Rafael Cardoso has been handed over the archive of his Jewish great-grandfather, Hugo Simon from Berlin, Germany. Rafael is deeply troubled by the hidden past of his family, which he only found out about when he was twenty-three years old living in Rio de Janeiro. Rafael shows his six year old daughter, Nina, a letter from Albert Einstein that his great-grandfather received to prove his real identity but the Brazilian authorities did not validate it.
Avital Carroll, who competes for the Austrian national team as a mogul skier, tells us the story of her grandmother, Elfi Hendell, who was one of the hidden Jewish children rescued by an Italian nun. After hiding in a convent in Northern Italy, Elfi made it to New York in 1944 on the last official refugee ship that left Europe before the war ended. Caroll visits her grandmother’s former hiding place in Rome, searching for her records and applying for the nun to be recognized as Righteous Among Nations.
Dave de Csepel and his family visit Wilhelm Jungmann & Neffe, Georg Gaugusch's family’s textile company, which was established in 1831, and clothed the aristocracy and upper-middle class from Vienna and Prague to Lviv and Czernowitz. Gaugusch became an informal archivist searching for answers to why an entire client group of Jewish customers was missing from his records. The Csepel family also visits the Hungary National gallery looking for artwork that was looted and stolen from their ancestors.