We are in 1939 and the Second World War breaks out. Alsace, at the crossroads of France and Germany, again suffered terrible events and part of its population was evacuated to the South-West of France.

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Among the institutions that must leave Alsace, the Hospices Civils de Strasbourg are forced to join Clairvivre, a utopian city reserved for tuberculosis patients, lost in the Dordogne countryside. Through the history of this establishment, it is the whole story of the evacuation and the exodus of millions of people that is put at the center of the book. The place became a beacon for exiles of all origins, Spanish Republicans, Alsatian and foreign Jews, refractory to the STO, resistance fighters, disabled people... The hospital provided care but it was also an establishment where one died.

A man, Marc Lucius, administrator of the Hospices Civils, manages the whole establishment, refuses to return to occupied Alsace and founds with others, the Refugee Hospital of Clairvivre. He will never cease to operate his hospital to save lives and not only those of the patients for whom he is responsible. The Clairvivre cemetery is the witness of an era, it has frozen space-time and makes us discover, through individual destinies, what Clairvivre was and what history the silent city reveals to us.