Between 1940 and 1944, when Alain Corcos was a teenager, the Germans systematically plundered the French countryside to feed their own armed forces and civilians. Both the Nazis and the fascist Vichy government forced everyone with "Jewish blood" to register as Jews, condemning those who complied to death in concentration camps.

The Little Yellow Train chronicles the years of occupation in France, describing the Corcos family's struggles to survive. In addition to finding enough food to sustain themselves, they needed to forge records and identification cards in order to conceal the fact that some of their ancestors were Jewish. When the SS began kidnapping young French men and women to work in German factories, the author and his brother decided that the time had come to escape and join the Allied forces overseas.