Set in 1940 at the beginning of Germany's occupation of France, the recently widowed Odile is a beautiful young mother fleeing Paris with her two children. When German planes bomb their refugee column Odile's car is destroyed, and she flees into the woods with her family. It is here that they encounter a 17-year-old illiterate delinquent, Yvan, whose survival skills and easy charm prove indispensable. The four fugitives stumble upon an abandoned house and the shelter soon becomes a home. Odile, at first suspicious of, but later attracted to the mysterious stranger, finds herself at the centre of a world she could never have imagined, a life that would seem to promise a simple idyll in a country consumed by war.