Sara, a religious fourteen-year old Jewish girl, is orphaned in a small town on the Western Front in 1914, and is left alone to take care of her nine-year-old sister. They live above a cafe and the ex-prostitutes who work there become their new family. She feigns madness after abuse, and struggles to maintain her sanity and the religious values of her sister during the First World War. Together with a Jewish medic who she idealizes and comes to love, she befriends a young volunteer who is traumatized by battle and is found barking like a dog on a train station bench. Thoroughly researched, Alone at War depicts the struggle to maintain spiritual integrity during one of the darkest epochs of European history.