IN DECEMBER 1941, AMOS AND SAMUEL JOHNSON, brothers from Chicago’s Southside, enlist in the US Army, one from a sense of duty, the other seeking adventure and an escape from his family’s expectations. But the segregated Army is slow to use Black soldiers, and they must grapple with the contradiction of fighting for the freedom of others in the name of a country that still treats them as second-class citizens.

Across the Atlantic, eleven-year-old David Cohen fights to survive inside a Nazi ghetto in occupied Poland. He later endured internment in a string of concentration camps, where he must navigate a system designed to erase him. Separated from his family and surrounded by hunger, fear, and loss, David holds fast to one belief: that American soldiers will come and set his people free before it is too late.

Their separate journeys collide in 1945 as Allied forces push into Austria. Set against the backdrop of World War II in the US and Europe, Black Messiahs follows three lives—two Black, one Jewish—as they, their families, their colleagues, and their communities battle racism in America as well as Hitler’s Final Solution, and the meaning of duty, faith, and freedom is forever transformed.