In 1941, twelve-year-old Rivke Rosenfeld lives in the Warsaw Ghetto, where she witnesses German soldiers slashing her grandfather's beard from his face. Her anger compels her to secretly write her stories and her memories in the margins of a book of fairytales by Hans Christian Andersen. When Dr. Emanuel Ringelblum, historian and founder of the Underground Archive--a written compilation of Jewish life experiences in the Ghetto--hears Rivke tell one of her stories, he is so impressed that he asks her to contribute her diary to this Archive, and Rivke agrees, imagining her words rising up from the ground on wings.