On a July night in Berlin, 1922, an old woman watches a house, waiting for the lights to go out. She is there to kidnap a child—a girl turning two the next day, whose life she has been following since her conception. Jerusza is 82 years old, the last in a long line of women who dwell in the natural world’s rhythms and know things that should be impossible to know.

Jerusza knows that this child was conceived the night her father heard a speech by a young Adolf Hitler. She also knows that although the Great War ended years before, new thunderclouds are looming on the horizon. She slips into the house and finds the child, Inge, awake as if waiting for her. The girl has an unusual, dove-shaped birthmark on her wrist and mismatched eyes—one forest green, the other twilight blue. Jerusza gathers the girl to her breast and carries her away into the forest.

In the years between 1922 and 1931, Jerusza teaches the child to survive in the forest, how to heal, and how to kill to defend herself. She gives the girl the Hebrew name