At the end of 1943, near­ly all of Europe’s Jew­ish pop­u­la­tion had been deport­ed, cap­tured or killed by Hitler, or had fled; only Hun­gary retained almost 800,000 Jews. They lived under edicts and restric­tions, but with­out fear of being mur­dered. That changed in March 1944, after the Nazi defeat at Stal­in­grad, as a des­per­ate Hitler accel­er­at­ed his plan for mass exter­mi­na­tion.

With the noto­ri­ous Adolf Eich­mann super­vis­ing the process, Hun­gary began round­ing up its Jew­ish pop­u­la­tion. In this dra­mat­ic new nov­el by Ronald H. Bal­son, US State Depart­ment diplo­mat Ted­dy Har­ti­gan and his wife Julia set out to res­cue as many peo­ple as they can. Work­ing with the new­ly-formed War Review Board, diplo­mats from neu­tral nations, and under­ground resis­tance groups, Ted­dy and Julia make con­tact with Swedish busi­ness­man Raoul Wal­len­berg. Wallenberg’s con­nec­tions and skills make him the per­fect can­di­date to work with­in the com­plex net­work of pub­lic and secret diplo­ma­cy, as he, Ted­dy, Julia, and oth­ers take enor­mous risks to save tens of thou­sands of lives.