The 1940s. In a crumbling, war-torn Europe, an eight-year-old Belgian girl named Charlotte flees the city of Liege with her family after her town is occupied by the Nazis. She leaves behind a happy childhood, a language, a way of life, a world. Unbelievable adventures and plots await her. Alter, Charlotte's uncle, is forced to work in the ghetto and face unbearably difficult moral choices. Dimitri Amilcabari, a French soldier of Georgian origin, arrives on the shores of North Africa at the head of the Foreign Legion to confront the forces of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. Among those joining the Legion is a volunteer from Uruguay, Domingo López Delgado, who will witness heroic and humane plots. Unlike thousands of monophonic novels set during World War II, The Girl Who Watched the Passing Trains captures, collects, and weaves together as many different motifs and voices as possible, a polyphonic storyline, to create a world (as the film "These and the Others" by Claude Lelouch does), in which a river of characters - children, parents, lovers, soldiers, friends, brothers - minor figures of history, together create a symphony about spaces, migrations, hope, love, and freedom, an uplifting symphony in the darkest period in human history. -Based on a true story-