1940s: Elise is a young French woman secretly helping the resistance in German-occupied Paris. Sebastian is a young German soldier working as a translator. They meet, fall in love, and are relishing in the unforeseen happiness they have found in one another, despite being on opposite sides of the war. After liberation, however, the young couple is tragically torn apart, with Sebastian arrested by the French resistance and Elise captured and shamed as a 'collabo' by her own people, before being sent to Brittany for her own protection.
The lovers are parted, each believing the other to be lost forever.
1960s: Elise and her 18-year-old daughter, Josephine, live in Brittany, France, with Brigitte, a gruff and bitter Frenchwoman who took Elise in after the war. Josephine has always been told that her father was a Frenchman who died when she was a baby-but when she discovers she is, in fact, the daughter of a German soldier, she travels to England to find out more about her real father. To her shock, she learns he is not dead, but living in the U.K. where he settled after the war and made a new life with his wife, Margaret, an Englishwoman, who knows nothing of his past.
When Josephine reveals that her mother Elise is still alive, Sebastian must make the most difficult decision of his life: honor his duty to his new family, or return to his first great love?
