Rosa is a Jewish woman from an educated, wealthy Polish family who endures the horrors of a concentration camp. Decades later, she lives in a rundown Miami hotel for the elderly after destroying the antique shop she ran in New York City. She isolates herself entirely from society, relying on her niece for financial support while obsessively holding onto the memory of her daughter.

Stella is Rosa’s 14-year-old niece who endures the concentration camp alongside her aunt. Lacking a dependent to care for or receive comfort from, she focuses entirely on her own physical suffering and survival. As an adult living in New York, she provides Rosa with financial support while urging her aunt to assimilate into ordinary American life.

Magda is Rosa’s infant daughter, kept hidden from camp guards through the concealment of a shawl. She possesses pale blonde hair and blue eyes, features that offer her a temporary layer of protection. The shawl serves as her pacifier, swaddling blanket, and primary source of comfort in the brutal camp environment, remaining central to her mother's memories decades later.

Simon is an elderly Jewish man from Warsaw who now lives in Miami. As the retired owner of a button factory, he is highly sociable, persistent, and good-tempered. Despite having a wife in a mental hospital, he maintains a cheerful disposition and continuously encourages Rosa to engage more with the world around her, shrugging off her active resistance.

Dr. Tree is a professor of clinical social pathology who studies the experiences of Holocaust survivors. He plans to visit Miami for a convention and contacts Rosa to interview her about the metaphysical side of survivor trauma. He uses highly clinical, jargon-filled language that abstracts the physical reality of the events he studies.