Wordwings, set in 1941, follows twelve-year-old Rivke Rosenfeld in the Warsaw Ghetto where she witnesses German soldiers slashing her grandfather’s beard from his face. Her anger compels her to secretly write her stories and memories in the margins of a book of fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen. When Dr. Emanuel Ringelblum, historian and founder of the Underground Archive–a written compilation of Jewish experiences in the Ghetto–hears Rivke tell her stories, he is so impressed that he asks her to contribute her diary to this Archive and Rivke agrees, imagining her words rising up from the ground on wings.