Marilyn Yalom's books include classics of cultural history such as A History of the Wife, Birth of the Chess Queen, and How the French Invented Love. A former professor of French, she was a senior scholar at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University. She lived in Palo Alto, California, with her husband, psychiatrist and author Irvin D. Yalom.

"This book is an effort to understand the effects of the experience on children of living through World War II in Europe and United States. It is based exclusively on first-person accounts recorded by people Marilyn Yalom had known closely as adults and after decades-long conversations with them. These friends convey wartime memories from childhood years spent in France, Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, England, Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Holland. In addition to their recollections, Marilyn Yalom added her own wartime memories-those of an American girl safely protected in Washington, D.C., while bombs dropped on my counterparts abroad"--