Gabor Boritt is an expert on Abraham Lincoln and the American Civil War. Fifty years after fleeing a continent ravaged by the terror of Hitler and Stalin, Gabor reluctantly returns to his native Budapest. Urged by his son, he faces the harsh history of his Jewish-Hungarian childhood: the Nazi invasion, the Holocaust, Allied bombing raids, Soviet tyranny, the 1956 Revolution and his escape to America. From the streets of Budapest to the fields of Gettysburg, Gabor discovers the intimate and epic history that transformed him into a great scholar of Lincoln, the Civil War and American democracy.