An elderly woman, (MARIE DUPONT), is on her deathbed. Her two middle aged children are by her. She seems troubled, but resigned and ready to die, when an elderly stranger arrives. The stranger is HELMUT KAUFMAN. With his arrival the lies Marie has told about her life slowly begin to unravel. Marie had led her children to beileve that she was French. Helmut reveals that she was Polish, and it slowly emerges that during the war Marie had been protected by Helmut, in return for becoming his mistress, and that together they had had a son, who had been given up for adoption. At first Marie's children are upset and angry about the deceptions and lies their mother told them, but they soon begin to realise that Marie only did what she did to survive, and that Helmut Kaufman was essentially a good man corrupted by an evil war.