Juana Salabert

In July 1942, under Nazi Occupation, the French and German authorities confined thousands of Jewish families in Paris’s Winter Velodrome before deporting them to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp. The so-called “Great Roundup of the Winter Velodrome” serves as both the starting point and the cornerstone of this magnificent novel, structured across two timelines. Fifty years later, the son of Ilse Landerman — a German Jewish girl who managed to escape the horror of the velodrome where her family was trapped — meets Sebastián Miranda, a Sephardic Jew, former International Brigades volunteer in Spain, and resistance fighter in France, where he organized a fragile child rescue network across the Pyrenees. Together, their stories weave memory and fate, grief and hope.