This sensitive memoir, written by an American psychotherapist, tells the story of a pre-Holocaust refugee's return to Germany, a journey that becomes both a pilgrimage to his childhood and an anguished search to understand it. Stern fled the Nazis with his parents in 1936 when he was nine, leaving behind an idyllic German village, relatives who were to be killed in the gas chambers, and buried memories. When he unearths his memories 47 years later, his recollections let loose the nightmares that provoke two painful return visits to the town of Speyer, one with his wife in 1983 and another with his son in 1985. Confronted with long-forgotten places and reunions with relatives and childhood playmates, Stern struggles to repossess what he had loved as a child. A charming narrow-gauge railway that carried him back and forth to his grandparents' village becomes the metaphor for his agonizing ambivalence: while Stern's central memory of Germany was the Peppermint Train, he knows that the critical experience for so many others, including some of his relatives, was a train to a death camp.
Questions about prejudice, mass violence, the human condition and the Holocaust begin to haunt him - and remain unanswered. Bringing his training as a therapist to bear on his experience, however, Stern examines his own motives in taking the trip, achieves a new understanding of his parents, and reaches some peace with his cultural history.