On a fateful day in May 1941, in Nazi-occupied Strasbourg, Alsace, seventeen-year-old Pierre Seel was summoned by the Gestapo. He had made the mistake of reporting a theft that had occurred in a gay area of town. The police added his name to a list of suspected homosexuals that was soon turned over to the occupying Germans.

To attempt escape would have meant the arrest and deportation of his family, so young Seel chose instead to report to Gestapo headquarters, starting out on a journey that would take him from the safety and innocence of his teenage existence to the horrors of the Schirmeeck-Vorbruch concentration camp.